You know… the end of the year is a beautiful wasteland.

The time between Christmas eve and New Year’s day has a strange, warped feel to it.  You know that you’re supposed to go about your regular life, because you already opened your presents and the tree is losing its needles (or in the case of our little rescued tree, losing most of its leaves) and the nights are getting just a teensy bit shorter and now it’s pretty much really for real this time no seriously okay kind of winter and it’s December 27th anyway…

…but you cannot.

December 27th is just a few happy days away from December 31st: count them.  There is today, the 27th (if you want to be technical); then comes the 28th (the day of the holy innocents, or which in the part of the world where Spanish is spoken is our April fools’ day, for some mildly macabre reason– and I must confess that it gave me the creeps last December 28th and I realized that, had my baby boy been born in times of Herod –and, uh born in Bethlehem– he would have been killed.  Did not sit well with me); then the 29th, and then the 30th.  That is four days. Then the fifth one is the 31st, or St. Sylvester’s day. New Year’s Eve.  The end of yet another year, and the reminder that we do age as a collective but that we also get new chances in our lives– even if they are completely arbitrary.

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I love this time of year. 

Okay, I won’t lie; I love days of celebration.  Even if it happens to be something not really celebrated, like Michaelmas (29 September); something that doesn’t exist anymore, like the feast of St. Crispin and St. Crispinian (25 October); something very much artificially created like Secre… er… Administrative Professionals’ day (26  April or sometime in late April); or something completely necessary and beautiful like National Ice Cream month (July), you bet your butt I will probably find a neuron to store it.  I like remembering people’s birthdays and finding out how holidays and other celebrations were established.  There is something about the passage of time and remembering things that happened long ago that makes it more entertaining to live, in my opinion.

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Herr Meow is a bit on the crankity-crank end of things (canine coming in?!), so I think I’m going to have to wrap this up on account of some painful-souding howling.  But rest assured that I shall be back.

And hopefully, with my typing fingers (2) intact.

27 Dec This entry was published on December 27, 2006 at 11:26 am and is filed under Onerous Onomastics. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.