Christmas in a land with a foreign language, far from home, can be a special experience.

An inspiration came to me like a morning star in the darkness. We could play Christmas carols, a universal language in Italy, on our flute and piccolo for patients stuck in hospital rooms at the L’Ospedale Santa Croce just outside the ancient walls of Fano.

We walked there on a night earlier this week to take a measure of the place. Finding a dark pre-modern campus with no real security, we followed someone right into a cancer ward. But we felt we needed more time to practice communicating my idea.

Back in our apartment, on my laptop, I called up the wonderful Google Translate. This time, I decided to try writing in Italian, to show myself how much I’d learned. 

Mia moglie e mi (should’ve been d’io) vogliamo THEN WHAT’S THE INFINITATIVE FOR “TO PLAY”? i flauti per i pazienti. Earlier, a saxophone player in the Piazza had told me the verb for TO PLAY but I had one consonant wrong in my memory. A very important consonant, apparently.

So the Google translation came out My wife and I would like. . .to get married.

I tried it with another (wrong) consonant.

My wife and I would like. . .nuns.

We fell into giggles over that. Then, with the correct Italian, I called the hospital switchboard. The nighttime operator told me, in Italian, to call in la mattina, Christmas Eve. 

Somehow that morning was taken up with other activities. Instead, we played Christmas carols for ourselves, in our apartment. By nighttime, last night, we attended the 7 p.m. Vigilia di Natale, Christmas Eve Mass, with a sizeable crowd in the medieval Fano Cathedral.

I decided to test my confidence once more by going up with the confessed Roman Catholics when they were receiving the Host. They took it in their right hand, in the modern fashion. Being an Episcopalian, I would do what we’re supposed to do to get a blessing, and not the sanctified wafer. I would cross my arms over my chest and get the priest’s hand passing over my head. It works back home at Our Lady of the Mountains.

My time came. I stood before an assistant priest who was holding a chalice full of wafers. I crossed my arms. He aimed a wafer, hurriedly, right at my mouth. I opened it, as much in astonishment as readiness to Take and Eat.

Maybe the Pope can forgive me. He’s from Chicago, after all, and speaks my language.

Merry Christmas, y’all.

Post Script: I learned in G.K. Chesterton’s book on Charles Dickens that Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol while in Italy, homesick.