Toasting the Season on the Ellipse

"I can feel my nose again."

"I feel my pores opening."

But what draws them to the fire is more than warmth for the body. It satisfies a yearning of the soul.

"I also make snowballs," Sandra Gengler, from Cromwell, Conn., is saying. "I put walnuts in mine."

She has just finished reciting to those within earshot the prodigious list of cookies she makes this time of year. The fire got her feeling nostalgic and chummy, and she started talking cookies. Her son, David Lickwar, an Army contractor living in Hyattsville, brought her to the fire.

"If you close your eyes you can almost imagine you're back home sitting in the chair, drinking the cocoa, eating the cookies, feeling the peace," she says. "You forget about the commercialism of the holiday season."

The flames and smoke conjure the fires of yesteryear. College bonfires, solstice bonfires, beach bonfires, pit fires to slow-roast the wild boar and the fatted calf . . .

Every three hours or so comes the singular Dance of the Forklift. The late-shift operator is Fred Adams, a 33-year veteran of the Park Service from Southeast Washington, the hunch-shouldered maestro at the controls. He motors the machine to the woodpile, selects a fat timber. He uses the blades like a spatula, nudging the log into position, then hoisting it high. He bears it to the fire like an offering, like a chalice on a tray.

He doesn't just dump it into the pit, he selects a precise location to most enhance the burn. He wheels the truck to the edge of the inferno, reaches the blades over the flames and deposits the log with something akin to the soft hands of a basketball player making a layup.

The impact sends a splash of flame and a spray of sparks skyward.

"Now that was cool," says Gladys Ruiz-Malca, 13. She and her friends on an eighth-grade field trip from Hyattsville Middle School have just arrived at the fire. From a distance they couldn't believe their wondering eyes. It looked fake. In their experience, spectacles like this are created with digital special effects, or by switching on a pilot light and dialing up the gas on the asbestos logs.

"Then when you get close you see it's actually real, and you see the sparks," says Gladys.