This was written for New Yorker by E.B. White in 1936.

Midnight Mass

Everyone has one Christmas he remembers above all others, one blindingly beautiful occasion. Ours is a Christmas Eve, during calf love, when we made the (for us) adventurous pilgrimage to a midnight Mass in a Catholic church. Church-going in our family had always been in the honest gloom of a Protestant Sunday morning, and we must hasten to explain that the purpose of this clandestine night expedition was far from religious; we simply had reason to suspect that if we visited that church at that hour, we would catch a glimpse of our beloved. Snow began to fall at sundown, and fell quietly all evening. The snow, the lateness of the hour, the elaborate mysteries of the Mass (we had never seen the inside of a cathedral before), together with the steady burning vision of the back of Her neck whom we adored, and then the coming out into the snow alone afterward, with the street lamps veiled in white: this indeed was a holy time.