New Year's Morning mood here.
Starting today, we'll be the lone house on the block with a lit Christmas tree. It's hanging in there. We don't keep the tree up till Candlemas, because I think I would have to run screaming into the night, but a few more days, a few more days . . . It's pretty for now, even in the morning light. Enlivens the gloom of a foggy winter morning.
Festive table also still hanging in there. We've eaten a candlelit dinner at this table almost every night since the kids first came home, with exceptions for pub nights. I'd love to keep that up for the whole twelve days, because things feel so much less ordinary when you eat in the dining room by candlelight. Or just when you eat by candlelight on a festive table, which you can do even if you don't have a designated separate dining room.
Outside, the lovely wet gloom of a winter morning:
The old high-school gym at the end of our street has been sadly moldering away. In winters past, the city has opened it for people to walk on their lunch hour, but for the last several years it hasn't been structurally safe.
Behind the gym, our downtown neighborhood turns to woods.
The predicted high today is 63F, honestly pretty nice, if wet. Having been a little cold, I'm now perfectly happy to be a little warm for a while. The older I get, the more I appreciate the gentle southern winter, with its variations on themes. After eight years in Utah, we've done snow. After four years in Cambridge, we've done the endless blast from the Siberian steppes. I will take this weather, with gratitude. In the south, I think it's the visuals that signal the season, as much as the temperature: you could have this street scene in colder or warmer versions, but as long as the trees look the way they do, you know where you are in the year. I get impatient in the autumn, as summer seems to stretch on and on without end, but then it does end, and here you are.
On this appropriate note, today marks Day 1 of my Year in Wool. It's also, and thank goodness, the end of my 2022 No-Buy Year, which I have discussed at length in many previous posts (if you're really interested in a year's worth of evolving thoughts on that subject, just search the no-buy year label, though I think that just gives you literally every post from last year).
Going into 2023 --- or rather, now that we're actually here in 2023 --- I have five wool dresses, all from Wool&, which give me a reasonable base for wearing wool daily. I like having enough dresses to rotate, so that I don't wear one dress into the ground. I am still wearing my Camellia dress from 2021's 100-day challenge, but that dress has required some significant refurbishment to maintain her "nice dress" status. It seems to me that giving each dress at least one rest day between wearings means a longer life for each dress.
It also means some refreshment and variety for me. While I don't mind getting up and putting on the same thing day after day, I think it's good for me, from a mental-health standpoint, not to do too much of that. Simplicity can tip over into acedia a little too fast for my comfort. Having to think a little about what I'm wearing is a good thing. Pushing myself to put on something different every day, as long as the different thing is just as easy to wear as whatever I'd have repeated, is important to my own wellbeing. That's one thing I've learned in the several years that I've been paying serious attention to how I dress.
Meanwhile, I have plenty of layers and accessories to enliven things. I haven't sat down and calculated the number of outfits I could potentially make out of the elements currently resident in my closet, because my head would explode, but I think I can safely say that I have more potential outfits already than I could wear in a year. Are they all good outfits, that I'd want to wear? That's the question.
Of course, I'd hope that all the elements I have would go together to make good outfits, not bad ones. I'd love to configure my closet to be foolproof, so that I could reach in, pull out literally any three things (1 dress + 2 other elements), and have something that looked good. Is that even possible? At any rate, one of the first things I'm doing, now that my no-buy is OVER, is to work on my supply of cardigans and other top layers, for all the seasons --- move out anything that's past its prime, cover all my good colors, give myself ingredients for a more flexible capsule wardrobe.
Wearing today, to kick off my Year in Wool:
Wool& Maggie, medium long, in marine blue. Navy Snag merino tights. Red Xero Cassie Mary Janes, making an appearance after a rest of some weeks. Very old thrifted silk/cashmere beaded cardigan. Layered necklaces: a Miraculous Medal I rescued off a rack in an antique mall on Main Street, plus a vintage 1920s silver filigree-bead necklace my husband gave me for some gift-giving occasion many years ago. The long necklace really finishes things here, I think, not least because it adds some definition to my otherwise shapeless dress. "Shapeless" is not a bad word here, by the way. I like soft, flowing lines far more than I like a lot of structure in my clothes. "Shapeless" really just means a dress can shape-shift a lot, as this one certainly does.
Nat Tucker, of Make It Look Easy, posits that any good outfit includes the following four elements: light, dark, color, and pattern. Now, any rule exists to make you go, "Do I feel like following this today?" BUT I think this Rule of Four is a generally useful metric for creating an interesting-but-cohesive outfit. Here I've got: my light cardigan (with beaded pattern, which is subtle but there), dark dress and tights, pop of color in my shoe. My shoe contrasts with the lowest hem of my outfit, also a good thing. I have additional subtle pattern in my necklaces.
I like that this outfit is simple, comfortable, and fluid. I like that the colors, except for my shoe, are subtle, that my contrasts are muted. I do like the surprise of a bright red shoe. I also love the luminous marine blue color in this dress, a perfect dark neutral.
With a thrifted wool-blend peacoat, to walk the dog, then go to Mass:
It's warm enough that I almost don't need the coat, but what the heck. I like it, and I don't wear it enough.
A dog-walk selfie in the rain-streaked doors of the old gym pictured above:
Dora and I wish you all a happy new year!
PS: I finished reading Master of Hestviken last night, a fitting end to my 2022 reading.