When I was little, I saw somewhere a small turn-of-the-century print of a guardian angel watching over a tiny girl and her little brother. They were in a dark forest or crossing a bridge, I think, much like the bridge out at Grandpa's that crossed over the ditch toward the barn.
The angel hung over them like a powerful force of good, her wings outstretched, arched high into the limbs of the trees, her eyes turned downward onto the two young children in a protective gaze.That image has stayed with me. From time to time, I see a copy of that print (it was very popular at one time), and every time I do it instills a feeling closely akin to what I felt then.
Angels are always with us, cropping up especially at Christmas. Their heralding fills most carols. We can't go to the mall without seeing whole choirs hanging from ceilings or clinging to chimneys along Main Street. Laced with snow and strings of light, they mark the path to Christmas. Their candles never wane. Their wings never fail them.
This Christmas I have thought a lot about angels. Our Christmas-tree ornaments of the past several years have included a cluster of delicate cardboard die-cut angels. As we took them from the box and untangled their strings, I studied the variety of their gestures as each took its place, some with their own hollow space between pine needles, like openings in clouds, and others hanging near enough light bulbs that bright essences of radiant light reflected over them.
What is it about angels that makes them persist, even with their wings, which we long ago discounted as vestigial appendages, cropped off by contemporary logic.
In small European village churches, chalk paintings of angels still adorn the high corners of the walls. In cathedrals, great marble angels weighing thousands of pounds float suspended in baroque splendor. Our love affair with angels continues. Hanging in the blue night of Christmas, they fashion a gossamer bond between heaven and Earth. They surround the high, hand-hewn beams of the Christian experience. They accentuate the humble manger of our purest hopes.
That may be why the angels of our family Christmas Eve gatherings at Veloy's parents' house over the years have imprinted so strongly on my memory. When it was time to get dressed for the Nativity program, the kids would jam into the back bedroom, where, amid boxes of bathrobes and Avon bottles of myrrh and frankincense, mothers would pin and tuck until all the shepherds were properly staffed and the wise men decked out in flashy splendor.
Most of those angels are grown now, and some have families of their own. But they remain in my memory as they were on Christmas Eve - Sally, Carrie, Pennie, Natalie, Emily, Rachel and Rebecca, and later, Carrie's two little girls (when they weren't all taking turns as Mary), scalloped and scrolled in white sheets, with coat-hanger halos hanging over their heads, lending a countenance that could not be defined as less than holy.
And though they never wore wings, I don't picture them without them. From the edge of the oldbedstead in the back bedroom, they anxiously prepared for their roles, looking up into fathers' flashing cameras and dazed by the craziness of mothers trading safety pins for combs and brushes.
Then, suddenly, everyone was ready, more or less.
In the living room, Uncle Steve would being reading from the gospel of Luke: "And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host . . . ," and the host would explode through the door in fits and starts - tripping and spellbound, and sometimes even crying, but still in full glory.
The images of those angels, as much as the printed picture I remember from childhood, are the guardians of my hope for peace, continuance and love. They embodied then, and embody still, the spirit of Christmas and all that Christmas promises as we wander, often lost, through the forests of our lives in the vague but protective shadow of angels' wings.
Dennis Smith is an artist and writer living in Highland, Utah County.