I Am This Woman

We’re home and winding it down for the day. Christmas 2007 is almost on the books (if we kept records). And again, for the 30th-something year, I did not get a pony.

Replete with friendship and good red wine, stomach a little too full of food, the trash can full of trash despite best efforts to go green, and full of the sense that one day is all too short for this dance with hope and joy. We might want it all year round … (well, not the kitsch, not the music, OH GODDESS PLEASE NO MORE HOLLY JOLLY CHRISTMAS!, not the gift exchange).

As fun as that may sound, what we need more is the ebb and flow, the rise and fall of satisfaction. The balance between feasting and fasting, between hanging out with Auntie Amy and thinking “I really miss Auntie Amy.” Rather than racing to the finish line, and then struggling to remain cheerful the.whole.day.long despite the depleted reserves… wouldn’t it be better to keep inching forward?

As pretty as it sounds, I succumb from the holiday letdown, which is real, occurring for me right around 9:30 on Christmas night. The realization that it all is over for the year, and what remains of this rarified tender specialness which I love, will soon be swept away in the push toward New Year, party hardy, clean sweep, out with the old, clearance, everything must go.

Very soon, I will begin the as-yet-unread new novel; I will break the seal on the new DVD and I will cast on the new yarn. The newness cannot remain and that is what this hour might bring into sharp focus, if I left all the lights to shine on it.

No, tonight, I will let the Christmas tree and luminarias blaze just one more night, keeping everything in a bath of mini-lights. I would stay here – full, satisfied, replete, without regrets, content with the here and now, a little dreamy from the Jolly Effect.

But it won’t stay that way… no one can live in the mean all the time, no one can rest at either end of the pendulum swing, indicator either at Jolly or Lump of Coal. Balance means being somewhere along the continuum in a fluid motion. At any given point in time, one is up, down, betwixt and between, and will not be exactly there at the next point in time. I know this feeling has to pass, but if I trust my own internal pendulum, then I also know it will swing back this way eventually. (And maybe much sooner than 365 days from now.)

Christmas 2007 will be about stopping just short of utter disgust with how much I ate; staying just long enough to leave some things to talk about on the next visit; nodding to but not dwelling on the guilt or regret; leaving something fun undone for next year’s holiday – this is the very unsexy but satisfying art of moderation. Not a bad present to give myself this year… But still not a pony.