Despite the big day that looms just ahead this coming Sunday, I always grow a bit melancholy on this date, the annual first day of winter for us folks here in the Midwest, the first of an endless procession of bullet-gray skies, bracing winds and slippery roads.
It seems the older I get, the more difficult colder weather seems to become, but I’m still not ready to make that full multiple-week Floridian commitment as so many of my loved ones and pals have done. In true American author Jack London fashion, I’m still not ready to tap out on that whole man-versus-nature conflict.
As for the season we’ve just bid adieu, I thought that run from mid-October to mid-November was spectacular, both in terms of the vibrancies of our autumnal hues and the crisp-but-not-too-cold temperatures by which we were blessed.
For me, it was a feeling of meteorological double-dipping, since the first week of October I was vacationing in the High Rockies in Colorado and saw the brilliance of that region’s deciduous trees, especially the golden groves of aspens that intersperse vast expanses of Ponderosa pines and Douglas firs. And then, once I made my way back to my Buckeye home, our colors were just beginning.
With every early November, there comes that annoying time change, something that perplexes me more and more as each year passes. It seems to me time moves efficiently and often far too quickly as it is and really doesn’t need much help when it comes to either falling back or springing ahead.
Now, I do know one thing. As a biorhythmic slave to light and the absence thereof, when it goes away, I tend to start looking longingly at a bed. In the winter, any time from around 7 p.m. on, unless I’m working a bar shift at the Knights of Columbus, I’m a threat to go horizontal.
As for this, the 366th day of the year that, you may recall had that odd 29th of February because of our leap cycle, I may be going to bed even earlier as a nod to the year’s shortest day for us Northern Hemisphere-ites.
As a glass-half-full guy, I’ll be comforted beginning Thursday that each day will add a few seconds of light in small increments to combat that feeling we who still labor have, which is it’s seemingly always dark, when we leave for our day’s labors and when we finally finish and return.
As for seasons and time and, of course, Christmas, which for many the joys of which are still in front of them, for me, at least when it comes to the family part, it’s already in the past. When I was younger and my babies were still babies, little could I ever envision not celebrating the familial aspects of Christmas on any day other than the 25th of December.
However, once my beautiful daughters went off and found fine young men with whom to consort and marry, men who also had families, things changed. Additionally, in an effort to seek their own desires as to how to spend the holidays and carve out their own traditions, each year, we Grindrods and my sister’s Whitakers have to be creative in selecting a time when all of us in our melded family can gather. That gathering date was Dec. 10, long before Santa will suck his prodigious pot in and slide down all those chimneys. So while much of the rest of you are in full-throttle anticipatory mode, my 25th will have a tinge of anticlimax.
Perhaps, though, that’s a good thing, in much the same way as I was able to experience the wonders of fall twice. Sure, the presents have all been opened and the turkey carved and the fancy foods consumed off my sister Joan’s best china, but with all that window dressing already removed, the spotlight can shine more directly on what has always been, as has been said, the reason for the season.
And, that’s not at all a bad thing. I’ll talk to you after your big day is over. Oh, before I forget, Merry Christmas to each and every one of you, gentle readers, and on this the shortest day of the year, to all a good night.
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