Toasting the Season on the Ellipse

"You wish you had marshmallows?!" (Actually, someone did the other day, and proceeded to roast them on long metal sticks.)

"Those look like walnut logs. Surely they're not burning walnut logs."

That last voice belongs to Mike McCann, a 60-something administrator with the Farm Service Agency. Every year, he and his wife, Robin, also with the FSA, come in from Fairfax City on an evening like this.

"I don't know what it is about a fire," says Robin McCann.

"It's magical," says Mike McCann. "It seems alive."

Walnut logs? The wood -- about 130 tons each December -- comes from "hazardous" trees cut down before they fall across bike paths and buildings in area national parks. This is a regional combustion, with contributions from Rock Creek Park, Anacostia Park, the George Washington Memorial Parkway, Antietam, the C&O Canal. The trail mix that hazard delivers typically comprises elm, poplar, red cedar, willow oak. The woodpile lies just beyond the circle of light, a vast timbered reef extending into the night.

While you meditate on the fire, you are treated to an awesome holiday music mix, playing on a repeating loop. The most surreal moment occurs several times a day when the voices of John Lennon, Yoko Ono and a children's choir send the cherubic refrain of "Happy Christmas" wafting toward the Truman Balcony: "War is over, if you want it."

The National Christmas Tree is glitzily spectacular, with the White House illuminated like a wedding cake in the background. A life-size nativity scene is a short stroll from the fire, with an intensely blond-haired, blue-eyed Baby Jesus.

But it is to the fire that people return after making the rounds. Their motive is in part practical, to get warm. A red chain-link fence keeps everyone back about six feet from the pit. If you stepped closer you'd burst into flames. The fence is hot to the touch. Your back is cold, but your face is hot. Your eyes sting. The heat currents do not swirl as low as your toes, so you lift your feet one at a time and balance them in the chain links.

"John, you're not going to believe this."

"That's a big fire."

"I feel like my eyelashes are melting."