Post-holiday slump season – use it
January after the 1st. No holiday. No party. The lights and decorations are still up, but they come down soon.
It’s dark and dreary outside. The temperature is supposed to dive. That’s what it does in January.
Last January, this part of the country had an ice storm. It would melt the next day, they told us. Day after day they told us it should melt tomorrow — the verb changed. I was retired, so I burrowed in and occasionally hauled food out of the freezer to cook.
Newscasts and internet feeds showed people sliding down sidewalks, and cars doing full rotations on hillsides. January 2024. I laughed at the videos — why are people falling and helpless on ice so funny? — and felt smug, motionless in my home.
The amaryllis has bloomed and is fading now in January 2025. The poinsettia leaves are dropping. The Christmas cactus is closing up shop.
I’m sipping a cup of hot chocolate because it’s warm. I was out on errands and there is a chill in my bones.
It’s a good time of year to be a writer, write down below the quilts, and snuggle in. I could download a book to listen to and be entertained without moving my eyes across a page. Or I could return to my most recent episode of the series I’m streaming, but I’m trying to lengthen the ending point, when we mourn the loss of the characters and the story and the other world we lived in, for a while, as we do at the end of a good novel.
A friend asked me what I was reading now, and I said truthfully that I was between books. That may be why I feel the chill, the dark, the post-holiday blues. I have left the characters of a good story behind, and am not ready to be unfaithful to them and pull up a new cast to occupy my brain cells.
Because I read much more in retirement than before, I am a more critical reader. I don’t know if the critic on my shoulder gets in the way of enjoying a good yarn — maybe I appreciate the plate-spinning more and can point out where a plate drops and splinters. Maybe I get impatient sooner, and close a book with a resounding clap.
I put away the completed jigsaw puzzle today. It was a years-old puzzle that had not been opened before. My family used to pull out a jigsaw puzzle between Christmas and New Year’s, and my brother and his wife were visiting, so I did the same. It enables us to have a quiet focus on a mutual task without the need for conversation. They had helped the time pass and helped with different points of view that see this piece goes there.
Stories wait to be told that need a piece fitted where it doesn’t look like it should go. I have more satisfaction writing a story that I invent, and is not like the jigsaw puzzle which requires me to follow the picture on the box cover, the puzzle prepared and cut to put the pieces together in only one particular way.
We still have 24 hours in a day, but the days seem shorter in January, at least the light is shorter in the northern hemisphere, and the stretch of darkness is longer. It’s a good time to focus on writing and reading and mending and pulling out records for taxes and dreary tasks that can be ameliorated by the smell of cooking stew or baking bread.
So I am off to make a chicken stew, move the cat from my lap, and close up the computer.
I hope you, too, find a bittersweet use for the doldrum days.
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