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Jan. 8th, 2006 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katallisonToday I took the Christmas tree down. This is always a relief. The tree is lovely when it first goes up, in part because it matches the mood of December, which is darkness, deep deep darkness with glittering distant lights, and yet cozy; and the tree is this great hulking dark shape with the glittering cold white lights (and yet cozy, all fuzzy with its multifarious needles, and its red and gold warmly-glowing ornaments), and its looming bulk blocks the west window and makes that whole end of the house dark and occluded and weighty.
January, by contrast, is bare, white, spare, Arctic, clean-lined--the start of the new year, pure and uncluttered, whereas December/Christmas is the nostalgia-ridden emotionally-entangled end of the old one--and so once the tree is finally down and out, and all the needles are swept up, I feel this great sense of relief. The wooden floor is bare and open all the way to the wall; the west window is unblocked, and afternoon sun floods through the living room; the snow falls white and pure.
I should add that for all the "January = Arctic" mentioned above, we're still in the blissful throes of Much Warmer Than Average here. An odd winter altogether; November was amazingly warm, and then right after Thanksgiving we went blammo down into the bitter subzero cold, and it stayed that way until Solstice, when, abruptly, things swerved back up above freezing, and there (mostly) we have stayed, in an almost-unbroken succession of grey, heavily overcast, foggy, drizzly, dank, somewhere-in-the-30s days. Quite a few people that I know hereabouts are hating this, and are loudly proclaiming their preference for sunshine, sunshine, even if accompanied by the subzero temps. Me, on the other hand? My stance is I don't care if the sun doesn't fucking come out until APRIL, as long as it stays blissfully above freezing like this. Which is to say, I really really should be living in the Pacific NW.
January, by contrast, is bare, white, spare, Arctic, clean-lined--the start of the new year, pure and uncluttered, whereas December/Christmas is the nostalgia-ridden emotionally-entangled end of the old one--and so once the tree is finally down and out, and all the needles are swept up, I feel this great sense of relief. The wooden floor is bare and open all the way to the wall; the west window is unblocked, and afternoon sun floods through the living room; the snow falls white and pure.
I should add that for all the "January = Arctic" mentioned above, we're still in the blissful throes of Much Warmer Than Average here. An odd winter altogether; November was amazingly warm, and then right after Thanksgiving we went blammo down into the bitter subzero cold, and it stayed that way until Solstice, when, abruptly, things swerved back up above freezing, and there (mostly) we have stayed, in an almost-unbroken succession of grey, heavily overcast, foggy, drizzly, dank, somewhere-in-the-30s days. Quite a few people that I know hereabouts are hating this, and are loudly proclaiming their preference for sunshine, sunshine, even if accompanied by the subzero temps. Me, on the other hand? My stance is I don't care if the sun doesn't fucking come out until APRIL, as long as it stays blissfully above freezing like this. Which is to say, I really really should be living in the Pacific NW.