Christmas greetings

Sincere congratulations on the brightest and the most joyous holiday - Christmas!

And I saw: the sky was darkened by the vaults, and the clouds interrupted their flight, and the course of time has stopped. Everything became frozen. The stream of the rivers’ water was silent. The gray mist descended on the banks, and tilted over the damp horn, did not drink the goats. The herd on the slopes did not move. The shepherd, raising his stick, stopped with a hand extended, looking upward, and over the river, over the palm forest, whose peaks were lowered, although the air was loose and dumb, birds hung on the frozen wings. Everything has stoped. Bethlehem was sensitively waiting... And suddenly a wonderful noise awakened in the leaves, and a flock of birds loudlyflew, and funny hooves sounded, and water stream started to whisper to me, and the shepherd suddenly heard the song! And far away, dispersing the gray twilight, as a kind of a Cross, the divinely light Star flooded over the recentlyflashed cave, where at that moment Mary gave the birth.

Volodymyr Nabokov GIVANELEY YAKOVA, Ch. 18 1918 y.