The youngest grandchild of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, vividly recalls the whole family gathered each year around an oak table to celebrate Christmas

What is more beautiful than a Christmas in Vermont and, above all, one which brings a snowfall at night, and the landscape descends into peace and silence? It is the classic Christmas that songs, cards, stories and traditions evoke. As a child growing up in Vermont, Christmas was magical: from heading into the woods to find our tree, to taking the ornaments out of their antique wooden box, to the baking and cooking of special holiday treats, and setting up the Nativity scene with its broken and mended baby Jesus.

After opening our presents, we’d go sledding. Our favourite hill was the steepest, and sledding was dangerous if the snow had formed a hard crust. At the bottom of the hill there was a large patch of ice, and beyond that a barbed-wire fence – you had to be quick and agile to not hit the barbed wire. We often gave our grandmother bad dreams. My mother, Tamar, had learned early to let go of her worry. “Don’t look,” she’d tell Dorothy.

For the meal, we would sit around the old oak dining table with the extra leaves taken out of storage and added to make room for us all. As the years passed, family members changed with each sitting, reflecting when my eight older siblings would leave home for university or marriage and return with spouses followed by babies, and then the spouses disappeared when the marriages failed, and new ones arrived. Then, most painfully, there began to be those missing: deaths in the family that had come far too early from illness and accidents.