Season's greetings!

BrontëBlog would like to wish you all a very, very happy Christmas (or your celebration of choice) surrounded by your loved ones. May your day be filled with love and laughter.

We would like to thank everybody that has participated on our contest. As usual we would like to have as many books to give as participants but alas !, we have just one. The winner has been emailed and we are pretty sure that Ann Dinsdale's The Brontës of Haworth will make a perfect Christmas present for a Brontëite. As we promised the winner's Christmasy quote is our weekly quote:

"Make haste, Heathcliff!" I said, "the kitchen is so comfortable; and Joseph is upstairs: make haste, and let me dress you smart before Miss Cathy comes out, and then you can sit together, with the whole hearth to yourselves, and have a long chatter till bedtime."

He proceeded with his task and never turned his head toward me.

"Come - are you coming?" I continued.
(Wuthering Heights, Chapter VII, Emily Brontë) from Polly, US.

This is a selection of some of the quotes that we have received on our email:

"How often, while women and girls sit warm at snug firesides their hearts and imaginations are doomed to divorce from the comfort surrounding their persons, forced out by night to wander through dark ways, to dare stress of weather, to contend with the snow blast, to wait at lovely gates and stiles in wildest storms, watching and listening to see and hear the father, the son, the husband coming home."
(Villette, Chapter XXV, Charlotte Brontë from Merry, US)

...Last Christmas I was a bride, with a heart overflowing with present bliss, and full of ardent hopes for the future - though not unmingled with foreboding fears. Now I am a wife: my bliss is sobered, but not destroyed, my hopes diminished, but not departed; my fears increased but not yet thoroughly confirmed.
(The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Chapter XXVIII, Anne Brontë from Maddalena, Italy)

“afterwards I shall go near to ruin you in coals and peat to keep up good fires in every room; and lastly, the two days preceding that on which your sisters are expected will be devoted by Hannah and me to such a beating of eggs, sorting of currants, grating of spices, compounding of Christmas cakes, chopping up of materials for mince-pies, and solemnising of other culinary rites, as words can convey but an inadequate notion of to the uninitiated like you.”
(Jane Eyre, Chapter XXXIV, Charlotte Brontë from Georgina)

"Come, mamma," said he, "by way of compromise, and to secure for us inward as well as outward warmth, let us have a Christmas wassail-cup, and toast Old England here, on the hearth."
(Villette, Chapter XXV, Charlotte Brontë from JaneFan)

"I knew it, I felt it to be the letter of my hope, the fruition of my wish...I experienced a happy feeling - a glad emotion which went warm to my heart, and ran lively through all my veins. For once a hope was realised. I held in my hand a morsel of real solid joy..."
(Villette, Chapter XXI, Charlotte Brontë from Marybeth)

Music I love, but never strain
Could kindle raptures so divine,
So grief assuage, so conquer pain,
And rouse this pensive heart of mine,
As that we hear on Christmas morn,
Upon the wintry breezes born.

(Music on a Christmas morning, Anne Brontë from Geoff, UK)

In the evening I went to the churchyard. It blew bleak as winter - all round was solitary.
(Wuthering Heights, Chapter XXIX, Emily Brontë from Natalia, Holland)

And so on...

Picture, courtesy of Beautiful Britain (source).

Categories: Messages from BB