Some holiday traditions are forever. Take for instance, the big blue recycle bin; it’s overflowing with cardboard and there’s a pile of cardboard that won’t be binned until the trashman comes and empties the bin. There’s one prime rib bone left in the fridge, the tree is molting and is no longer being watered and nobody has bothered to light the Christmas village for the past few nights. All traditional signals that Christmas is behind us.
The waning holidays are taking me back a year. It’s a pleasant journey. The families gathered for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day; hugs, kisses, handshakes, shared potluck, children huddled over new toys. It’s an unpleasant journey; the sad realization that one bad year feels like decades. It’s almost hard to recall what those pre-COVID days were like. We talk about those days with nostalgia, almost like the characters in those movies that take place in a post war dystopia, “Remember how pleasant the holidays were before the nuclear war?”
It’s happening again this year just like every year about this time; that scornful look back at the outgoing year. It’s time to blame the calendar or a Gregorian number for what we perceived as twelve months of woe, comforting ourselves with the idea that a new calendar, a new number will bring on better days to come. Are we never satisfied? Are we always looking for the great panacea that we believe resides in twelve new sheets of paper?
“Let’s not get that classic car calendar this year, it brought us bad luck. Let’s try puppies or national parks.”
If we’d known a year ago what we were in for we’d have settled for a replay of 2019. Most of us, about 99%, are justified in throwing 2020 on the scrap heap of shattered years. The other 1%? They seem to always get by don’t they? And maddeningly enough they’re getting by better than usual.
The Life in My Years 