Christmas in the gray light of the last day of the calendar year. It feels that way, too. This is the point where we start forgetting to light the Christmas tree. We kind of stop looking at it. I'm still setting the table with Christmas dishes, but the feasting has assumed a sort of grim determination, and nobody really wants any more cookies. Tomorrow all the holiday lights in the town will go dark, and the world will have resumed its ordinariness, as if this season had never happened. But it's still Christmas. Isn't it?
I never really know what to say about any of this. I find it hard. I want to love Christmas, but honestly, what I love is looking forward to it. The actual feast is a lot of work: first the arduousness of preparing the feast, all the cooking, cleaning, decorating, and hospitality. Then persevering with it is, strangely, even harder work. Now the work is interior: making myself get up and think about the Incarnation, and care.
If this sounds gloomy . . . well, I don't think it is, especially. It is what it is. I feel this way every year, once the house has emptied of our festive company. And I wonder: what did the world feel like, itself, in the days after the great birth? What did the shepherds do, not the next morning, maybe, but the morning after that?
T.S. Eliot, of course, has imagined the aftermath for the Magi. This is one of those poems that make me wonder why I bother. The works of Venantius Fortunatus affect me the same way –– I read or sing the words of "Of the Father's Love Begotten" (or as the English hymnals have it, "Of the Father's Heart Begotten," which I think I like even better), and I wonder why, exactly, I have to exist, when those words are already in the world. Well: the love and desire and vision of God are infinite, and there's clearly something I'm supposed to be doing. Never mind that infinitely more perfect things have already been done.
Meanwhile, everybody is looking back on 2021. I myself have kept a running list of literary things on my author site. The year in review feels in many ways neither here nor there, but objectively, I did a lot. I also sent children to college, buried one dog and acquired another, and went hiking in the beautiful mountains with my husband, in whose company I have found renewed pleasure since the last children left home. I also wore a wool dress for a hundred days and contemplated many things related to that challenge.
And I read a good deal. In no particular order, these books stand out to me now:
*The first fourteen Roderick Alleyn mysteries by Ngaio Marsh
*The complete Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
*Paul Pastor's book of poems, Bower Lodge
*American Divine, poems by Aaron Poochigian
*Caroline Gordon's How to Read a Novel
*The Letters of Caroline Gordon and Flannery O'Connor
*Charlotte Mason's Volume 6: Towards a Philosophy of Education, which I reread this past year
*All the Barchester and Palliser novels of Anthony Trollope
*A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders
*Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations, which I'm not sure I had ever read straight through as a book, though of course I knew most of the poems well already
Finally, in the last few weeks especially, I've been gathering myself to embark on a year of wearing my clothes, but not buying new ones, starting tomorrow. Today I'm wearing the second of the last bamboo swing dresses I've bought.
As you can see, this dress is very purple. It's the same short-sleeved model as the blue dress I wore day before yesterday, but in a medium, not a small. I think it's about an inch shorter than my Wool& Camellia, shown here:
I dunno.
A lot depends on how I'm standing.
Anyway, I feel kind of like a King Cake today, but I like this dress. Like all my other bamboo swing dresses, it's soft and comfortable, and the fabric feels warm against my skin on an overcast, damp day. I am wearing it over a bamboo slip, too, as a base layer. Cardigan is my trusty thrifted J. Crew cotton cardi in this beautiful deep emerald; leggings are cheapo charcoal-gray non-natural-fiber, but somehow my legs mind that less than my core does. Wool socks, Doc Martens, hair all down and flowing for a change.
I was afraid this purple would feel like a bit much, but the dress was so cheap on Poshmark that I took the gamble, and I do like it. One of the reasons why I don't much appreciate that "seasons" system of determining a person's color profile is that mine indicates that I don't wear jewel colors. And you know, sometimes I do wear jewel colors and like them, and think I wear them pretty well.
I like having possibilities suggested to me, and also confirmation that what I don't feel good in I don't have to wear. But anything that says, You wear X, other people wear Y, and doesn't take into account the fact that sometimes Y is absolutely what I'm in the mood for: ain't got time for that. Give me the yes, every time.
That could be my motto for 2022: Give me the yes. What does it mean? I don't know, because I only just this second thought of it. If I hold onto it, though, I'm bound to find something out.