Actually, I’ve been noodling on this all week, but just got around to posting it.
In ten days this will all be over. That was my first conscious thought upon awakening the morning of the 15th. Of course, by the time you read this, it’s much closer to over, if not over already.
December is the strangest month on our calendar. The first 25 days are devoted to whatever happens for you on the 25th day, whether you spend it alone or with others. Then the music stops. Santa returns to the North Pole; friends and relatives return home. The holy infant Jesus vanishes outright until his crucifixion and resurrection at Easter.
The lights and decorations may stay up, if only in a now-futile effort to stave off the midwinter gloom, but all those warm feelings of anticipation and fellowship and festivity are gone. You’re left with one solid week in which every day feels a month removed from the good times until the big drunken bash on New Year’s Eve.
And were any memories made on New Year’s Day itself? It’s probably the dullest holiday of the entire year, right there at the very beginning. No one’s throwing a big grill-out party in their backyard for this. It’s not a social day at all. You just sit at home with your hangover until you go back to work the next day.
This being 2020, the next day is Saturday. See, it’s not such a bad year after all. Unless, of course, your job has you working Saturdays.
That’s always been my problem with Christmas. Even in optimal circumstances, with family and friends to look forward to and presents to give and receive, once the sun sets on Christmas Day, that’s it. The happy songs now sound out of place, the decorations look just tacky. There is no denouement or “cool-down.” You go straight from the golden warmth of the hearth and the garlands and lights to the gray ice and freezing darkness of late December and the first empty and dull months of the year. No transition. The spirit is there. Then it’s gone.
It is what it is. Thank God there's still time. As with Thanksgiving, we need Christmas now more than ever. Here's hoping yours is spent in good company.
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