Merry Christmas!

Winter Foxes, Haworth Parsonage (2012)
by Amanda White (Source)

Christmas 1845 saw all four Brontë siblings at home at the same time. The future then didn't seem too bright. Branwell had been dismissed from his post as tutor and Anne had given up her own position as governess to the same family. Charlotte had been missing, or rather longing for, M. Heger for a couple of years now. Emily and Patrick were the ones that at least outwardly would have seemed more content. And yet, as Emily herself had written in 1838,

There is a spot, mid barren hills,
Where winter howls, and driving rain
But if the dreary tempest chills,
There is a light that warms again.

The house is old, the trees are bare,
Moonless above bends twilight's dome
But what on earth is half so dear,
So longed for, as the hearth of home?

And yet that Christmas also saw the end of the Brontë governesses. By the next Christmas, the girls would be published authors, their writing careers launched (The Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell was published in 1846), their names--even if still hidden behind pseudonyms--never to be forgotten.

That is our rather roundabout way of whising our readers a very happy Christmas. May it be a time full of hope spent in the 'hearth of home'.