Halcyon Days

And so the festive season has come to a close. After weeks of complaining about how Christmas has become too commercialised, and how Christmas shopping is so deeply vexing and frustrating, and how spending time at home with our familys left us feeling claustrophobic and inevitably led to arguments, and how we dislike the enforced celebrations of New Year’s and how the pubs are always too busy and cramped and invidious, we can at last settle into a few weeks of telling each other how depressing it is that the festive period is over, and we have nothing to look forward to for months.
There is a wonderful phrase in this year’s Doctor Who special discussing the meaning of Christmas (but avoiding any silly religious mumbo-jumbo, this being a secular sci-fi show produced by the godless, liberal heathens at the BBC), which describes the mid-winter period as being a time to celebrate our having made it half way through the darkness of winter, and beginning our slow but steady progress back towards the light and warmth of summer. This time is, for me at least, one of the best of the year; a time to look, janus-like, both back and forward over the previous and coming twelve months, mourning losses and celebrating joys, and rueing mistakes and vowing to learn from them, and thinking of ways to improve and enhance and refine one’s life and mind and body and soul.