As the Yule Log Burns Down

"The yule log smouldering in the hearth is like a wild beast in a cage. It comes from another world, that of wilderness and the elements. Its conflagration is a giant hourglass for the rhythms of the Christmas feast, slow-burning with the same patient unhurried sense of time that is evident in its rings of annual growth. The tree's enormous pent-up energy, released into the Christmas parlour by slow degrees, is full of the remembered warmth of spring and summer and the promise of warmer days to come. The essense of the yule log is that its pleasures should be long and slow: it must consume itself gradually, with no sudden bursts of too-passionately flame to spirit away its substance up the chimney into the cold night."

"The Everlasting Flame" by Roger Deakin
in the December 2003 issue of "Country Living."