Rituals

I don't think I've ever tidied Christmas - the tree, the cards, that sort of thing - away on Epiphany/Twelfth Night. I never felt it made sense to remove all signs of festivities on the day when we were supposed to be celebrating the arrival of the Magi to see the infant Jesus - as if somehow we were thinking to make it harder for them? But also I tended to have this growing attachment to the tree of the year, and a dislike of the empty space that it had filled so substantially, blocking out the cold dark that filled so many hours out of every twenty-four. 

I didn't think it'd happen this year. Four weeks ago when we bought the tree that was too large for us and gave ourselves hernias (I exaggerate, but ...) lifting it into position, I'd gone right off the whole idea, and when we decided that we were going to have to spend Christmas on our own it seemed like a travesty. But I duly decorated it, and it's stood there for a whole week longer than I usually have a tree, and today I dismantled it. And boy, do I mean dismantled ... In order to avoid further injury, I literally took the tree to bits with the aid of the long-handled loppers from the garden shed, cutting off two thirds of the branches (the mess!) and removing them in a great untidy bundle to the garden. This was followed, in a bizarre procession, by the trunk with about a foot at the top still bearing its branches, carried out vertically by Himself while I held various doors open. And there it shall lie, dismembered, until I persuade the gardener to remove it when first he returns for the Spring tidy ...

So I'm blipping not the sad tree but the baubles and other ornaments, safely in their boxes for another year. (If either of my sons should be reading this, they might care to see how many they remember - that plastic reindeer, for instance, belongs to one of them, as does the rather cute Santa on his straw camel.) The glass baubles, in the red box on the right, are 50 years old, dating as they do from our very first tree. I bought them in Woolworth's ... and beside them, the Ikea ones that don't break if they fall but instead bounce jollily across the floor. There are little mini-glitter-balls that I remember buying on a visit to Glasgow to see my mother shortly before she died. And some are new, came from crackers pulled only last year at family tables or falling out of Christmas cards from a friend who always likes to include them with her greetings.  I love them all - and they still need to go back up the ladder to the loft. 

Other than that excitement we had yet another walk and yet another dramatically lovely sunset. We watched the ten o'clock news with the same disbelief that I remember watching the fall of Ceausescu (spelling?) and the fervent hope that the security services look after President-Elect Biden well. And then we caught up on the evasions of our so-called senior politicians who had been photographed cosying up to Trump, and worried about the potential for screwing up the rollout of the vaccines.

Oh - in a final piece of news, I've walked a total of 37 miles in the first week of our "100 miles in January" challenge. Go me!