January. I don’t have much use for it; hate it, really.
January is a dark and cold reminder that we’ve eaten too much, drunk too much, spent too much, perhaps slept too little, for way too long. Boom. The scale. The credit card bills. Dry, cracking, pasty skin. Freezing pipes.
Every January I’d like to turn myself inside out and hide until the first crocus peeps through the thawing ground.
Not today.
Call me nuts, but today I added about 20 Christmas cards, which have trickled in over the last two weeks, to our sprawling display. Every year I use nearly two full rolls of masking tape to affix incoming cards to the molding around the doorways in our home. One hundred seven in all this year–so far.
Today it hit me. One hundred seven people or families expressed their love and good wishes – to us!
One hundred seven people went to the time and expense to buy or hand-make cards. Some signed their names or wrote lengthy personal notes. Some even addressed envelopes. They spent 46 cents apiece for stamps. They went to the mailbox. To wish us a merry Christmas and a happy and healthy new year.
Today, in the frigid darkness of the month I despise, I counted 107 expressions of good wishes. And, as I counted these blessings, I saw light. I felt warmth.
In the rush of opening the mail, we can forget that there is meaning in the wishes that honor the holy event we celebrate in December, and there’s immeasurable hope in the wishes for a happy and healthy new year.
Fellow January-haters: Let us thumb our noses at seasonal affective disorder by re-reading our Christmas cards (if they haven’t already gone out with our dried out evergreens) or remembering at least one person who wished us well, and appreciate how much we are loved.
And let there be light.
Enter the new token, the cat. This crazy cat lady has no complaint against Fluffy, but it’s replacing my all-time favorite token, the iron.
I’m not in the direct path and, as of now, Sandy hasn’t yet made the scene. It’s little more than a rainy Monday where I am but already I’m seeing posts of disappearing electricity from the other side of the Beltway.
Two days ago, I stocked up supplies on while they were still on the store shelves. Yesterday I organized my refrigerated goods. Today, after tending to a client project, I vacuumed the house and ironed some altar linens for the church.
As we turn in to the home stretch of 2012, I pause to appreciate the most important 100-year-old thing in the life of my family — our house.
But, after losing power again yesterday, something struck me. Without juice, it’s hard to tell time.
I remembered that we received six clocks—none electric—as wedding gifts 27 years ago. It was comforting to rediscover that some if not most of those are still around. Then I remembered the trusty timepiece my husband brought into our marriage, a relic from the 1950s, when his father sold shoes for a living.
You know it goes: Contestants are asked to “Name something that …” as they aim to match their answers with answers of others on their team, as well as with survey responses cast by the audience. If instructed to name something you would find your refrigerator, for example, you might say “milk,” knowing that might be a popular—and hence, high scoring—answer.
A week’s worth of grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning are finished now, on the eve of December 23rd, as finally I sit quietly, with my feet on a pillow, laptop atop my lap, glass of wine nearby, committed to reflect quietly before the Yuletide.
There were songs on that album that you don’t hear—at least I haven’t heard—on other collections: “I Wonder as I Wander,” “Go Where I Send Thee,” for example. I always loved his rendition of “Caroling, Caroling.”
Word Nymph 