holidays

Holidays are here. For many, it's been a long several weeks. Lots of students are gleefully anticipating their return to school. Many adults can't wait for the holiday cheer to slip off into the distance. Temporary housemate knows this story; sweetie knows this story; I know this story. Reclaiming the holidays is a combination of resistance and engagement--finding ways to make the seemingly unreasonable and illogical rules make sense or begone, one or the other. For some people, holiday resistance is an extension of religion resistance. For some people, religion tells them to resist the holiday. The struggle to fit religion to the most common celebrative traditions is a major issue in religious circles.

I believe this: if we can celebrate the return of the sun; if we can celebrate sharing and generosity and kindness; if we can celebrate love beyond measure and the miracle of each person's life; if we can lift up stories of people who could be any of us becoming prophets; if we can lift up the wise and the sacred in each person...then we have remembered the spirit of the season.

twelve Novembers long*

We are stuck in November.

I have figured it out. There is November every month, somewhere, and the Pacific Northwest got all the extras that no one else wanted. Not cold enough to snow, not warm enough to grow, we are held between fall and spring, in stasis. It’s kind of like having someone refuse to cry when they’re grieving.

So what could possibly be helpful about being here? There must be something.

We get a rest from all that pesky greenery. The grass is green and everything else is brown. Come July they will switch.

Okay, that’s not so helpful.

Our eyes don’t have to contend with all that sun. No sunglasses necessary.

Um.

Yeah.

I know. We get very good at waiting. That’s it. Advent here begins in December but continues until February, when the crocuses start to push their way through the snow mud. All this time we wait for life to begin again. We have no weather-specific activities for November. We can’t sun on the beach or go sledding at the local park. I haven’t seen any roasted chestnut vendors, even though I walk through downtown to get to work every day. We don’t get to make wardrobe concessions to forty below weather and come to work in boots and wool sweaters, ruddy from shoveling three feet of snow. There is not only nothing that must be done, once the last leaves are raked, there is nothing that can be done, nothing but wait. And so after the impatience comes the frustration, and after the frustration comes the lethargy, and after the lethargy comes the calm, and then the serenity, and at least we get rest in these months of grey.

We get to take a good long look at our indoor spaces, the ones we neglect when our gardens are outgrowing their beds and the trees are beckoning from the sidewalks. We can consider, and contemplate, and ruminate, and change. We can get settled in. We can nest.

And then things start growing again.

I may just be too impatient for this.

We shall see.

*quoted from Gordon Bok's "The Schooner Ellenmore"