New Year, New me.....

 

The Christmas holiday, it is meant to be a long awaited time off. The thing is I failed to make a decision about what I was having time off from.  You cannot - as much as you try, ‘take time off’ from yourself, that is something that you need to learn to live with, and I have been as irritating as fuck.

I pushed aside my irritation by general ‘to do-ness’. Over the holidays,  I feel as if in doing the whole feasting and merriment thing, no matter how full or un-merry  I may have felt I have been somewhat connected to my ancestors. These are the ancestors who knew feeding their farm animals over the winter months was a job too far, so they killed and feasted upon all but a few- leaving meat on bone piles left behind for modern day archaeologists.  I wonder if Neolithic humans wondered what to gift Great Aunt Maud or just filled their solstice days with the kind of oblivion that is necessary when life is so hard, so short and so bloody cold. I also wonder how far back we can trace Seasonal Affective Disorder and what happened to our forbearers who couldn’t be arsed to shift back the furs and begin another new, short and cold day?  I am glad that the days are lengthening again, but also wracked with the guilt of a gardener who has forgotten to plant those bloody spring bulbs.

-Christmas is a strange period of time, with our British collective attempt to become sentimental over baby Jesus and rediscover the joys of collective singing. Many of us put in a hearty attempt at celebration, but many of us have lost the art form and the substitute of buying it in, leaves me fraught with anxiety. My mother visited over Christmas and sentimentally I remember a general Christmassy feel that didn’t cost the earth, but when I looked for Christmassy things to do around Leeds all I could discover was Instagram photo opportunities accompanied by the parting of many pounds.  I may have missed the point and could well be mis-remembering, but those ridiculous fuzzy-felt quotes in neon pink hanging throughout Briggate (a main shopping street in Leeds) are not helping to jog my memory. I may be old fashioned, but what is wrong with the magic of fairy lights, a few snow folk and a fat Santa? Excuse me, if at the age of 46 I resent being told, in substandard handwriting, that my ‘Future’s in sight’. No shit Sherlock, unless of course I die immediately after being faced by such banality. The thoughts leave me colder than any SAD symptom usually does.

I left putting up my Christmas tree ridiculously late this year. For a while I strove in existential crisis over buying a ‘real’ tree and by the time I put such ridiculous anxiety aside it was too late, every real tree that was accessible to us was sold out. The positive side of my silly behaviour was that we saved Douglas, a potted Douglas fir (did you see what we did there?) that we bought last year that has marginally survived a year of pot- bind and neglect. It was my son who insisted that Douglas should be given a second chance and I almost believe in his faith that Douglas will prevail, even after the crimes against Christmas good taste we inflicted upon him.

And so, this year I have cast aside any public declaration that I will enter 2022 a better, more rounded human being; it is here I am also feeling ancestrally linked - they were probably too busy cradling their pig stuffed bellies with one eye on how they’d summon the strength to get through the winter, because after all this is the beginning of the hungry gap, not the end.