It’s Twelfth Night, and the three kings arrive tomorrow.
On this Twelfth Night, I feel the vacancy of my daughter gone away. I look at the tree to enjoy its final moments and feel perplexion as I realize that much of my appreciation of its beauty lives in expectation of exciting times to come – times that are now past. I feel a sense of bloat, that I have feasted too much, listened to the music too many times, spent too much – that I have taken more than I had a right to and more than was good for me. Amidst the confusion – nostalgia for a holiday not yet ended and eagerness to move on – I know it is enough.
Much have I eaten, and much have I drunk. And the lights still twinkle on the Christmas tree. Yet we are at the end of something and at the beginning of something else. In our busy lives in this time and place of plenty, what I really want to know is whether we will know the difference. A transition is suggested by the sense of loss that will suffuse our labor of undecorating. And we have marked New Year’s with resolutions and hope for the future.
What lies ahead? January is a cold month where I live. Though the days are actually growing longer, the mood of desolation and cold will persist, echoed by Ash Wednesday and Lent – a season on the Christian calendar that coincides with the hunger time of old – the plenty after a complete harvest a memory and the scarcity of late winter before spring crops return a mournful reality. We won’t see the scarcity at the grocery store, and the sacrifices of Lenten observances are required of few of us. Yet without these physical rhythms our days lack shadow and their light is polluted by incessance. As mortal beings, we ourselves cannot be so homogenized; there will be pain – we or people we love will find misfortune, our bodies will fail in small or in large ways – and it seems to me much harder to understand these marks of mortality in a world where all evidence of these rhythms is lost. As the earth comes back to life in spring and summer after the decline of fall and winter, we see that we are part of a process wherein death initiates birth and birth resolves in death.
As fall culminated in wind and cold and dead plants at Christmas (my garden seemed a sad, sad place), some of us marked a birth (actually, there were lots of birds there). We need both the growing and the dying away. So as those three kings usher us out of the festive season and into these months of deep winter, I am both sated and longing for something more. I look to days quieted of feasting and festing, against which Christmas will sparkle in memory and warm air and fresh tomatoes will glimmer in the future.
-Hannah Grachien, January 5, 2021