Every year about mid-November I begin decorating the house and starting my holiday planning and wonder how I'll ever find myself feeling sick of it all by about December 26th. It seems like I've waited so long for the season and it's such a joy to celebrate.
After all, I am the woman who will spend two hours in front of the television on a 100-degree, busy July day watching a Hallmark Channel "Christmas in July" movie, should I happen to come across one. And please don't lose respect for me when I tell you that during the same summer season, if I happen to be channel surfing and land on QVC somehow (Totally by accident! Honestly!) and discover they are selling holiday candles and lights, I will stare at all those LED lights and fake snow like a drunk ogling a bottle of Smirnoff.
It's everything I can do to keep myself from calling their 1-800 number or going online to buy it all, because I have a persistent, subconscious and irrational belief that doing so will somehow signal winter to come even earlier than usual.
Yet I can only take about a month of full-on, actual true-life holiday merriment. I could never live in one of those "Christmas-all-year-long" villages that are always the settings of the Hallmark movies, for instance, because I'd end up in the town's silver and gold, garland festooned jail for killing the local Santa once it all became too much to look at and listen to and I snapped. And I'd probably go scott free with a not guilty verdict too, because I know there are others who feel the same as I do.
For people like us, December 27 rolls around and we begin the deconstruction of All Things Holiday, happily trading all the glitter in for the next season, which I call Quiet Winter.
Quiet Winter is the time when it's still cold outside but your home and social life are in a kind of winter dormancy rather than a holiday frenzy. Dinner is at the same time every night, with the usual meals, and with the same people. Your house is relatively organized. And after a month or more of merrymaking, overeating and rushing around, there is nothing left to do but sink back into your schedule and little routines of your life as the snow falls, the rains pelts or the sun shines, depending on where you are.
Quiet Winter is lovely here because it breaks and gives way to spring relatively early. In the east and midwest, you have "mud season," which probably lacks the delight of either the holidays or Quiet Winter. For us, it will be the end of next month when the pear blossoms will begin to turn the trees white and the vineyards start to bud break. The roses will begin coming out of dormancy soon after. But without any major holidays sandwiched over a month or two, things will still feel slow and manageable. Time to organize the house, lose the five pounds you gained over the holidays and just enjoy the fact that nothing much is pressing in on you. You're not obligated to be anywhere beyond your normal day-to-day responsibilities.
Like the holidays, we don't always get the chance to celebrate Quiet Winter due to shifting circumstances in our personal lives, but if you can and are able to, I wish you a long, lovely, and peaceful Quiet Winter.
We say "Peace on Earth" in December, but sometimes it's not really until January and Quiet Winter that we're able to feel that manifesting in our lives.
