It is during this season that Calgary has the early evening, the thick darkness that descends to end our short days. This is the heart of our winter. Solstice, the longest night, has just passed. The cold has driven us indoors and hot drinks and a slow pace are in order.
Sometime immediately after boxing day and just before the new year breaks is this twilight season where I often find myself in a contemplative mood, staring past the lights, seated in a fine chair, pacing myself with a good book and a great glass of port.
I am up late at this time of year, the night seems to stretch on forever – broken only by these shorter hours of sunlight. At times the nighttime clouds lower and the city light reflects back this warm rose hue onto snow-silenced streets. I find myself in a content melancholy at this time.
Expectations on my time lower, and I find my pace slow … I am given time for remembering, reflection. Friends and family who are no longer around me show up as happy ghosts, faded memories recalled by candlelight. For many of us, it is in that very brief space – after Christmas sentimentality and just before the New Year crests and breaks – it is in this lull that we may find the luxury of a moment, this pause. The shopping is over, Family has been welcomed, Friends have dropped by. Dinner has been already been served and re-served, (re-served and re-served).
We are now in this is the season of waiting
The new year is about to begin.
I have sometimes felt that the beginning of the new year in mid-winter is somewhat strange, the year begins when most of the earth is sleeping, dead and quiet. This time seems the quietest of the seasons. Chinese custom has the new year celebration in February, sometime just before Spring. This makes a lot of sense to me. Spring definitely is a season of new beginnings. The start of Spring brings the gardeners out in many of us. We step out onto the lawn, critically examine the plants, greet our neighbors, trim the garden. For the ranchers surrounding Calgary, the cattle have come – usually sometime during those early spring storms. The Farmers are preparing equipment, finalizing loans for seed and gear to carry them through another planting season. In the unofficial new year celebration of spring there is a sense of looking forward of preparing for this time of birth and growth.
Even September brings another type of beginning. A time to sharpen pencils. Freshly scrubbed five-year old faces are soon salt-streaked as moms cry their tears to mingle with the new start in new schools. The late teenage push to finish up the summer job, buy the futon and laptop, and pack it all somehow into the cases that mom and dad drive to the new dormrooms in college. Friends return to town from holidays at cottages and families. The unofficial Calgary Stampede Slack season is drawn to a very firm close as downtown firms gear up for freeze-up. The Fall season is another unofficial new year, one looking to our future goals, our dreams.
I suppose this is why I think that this click of the calendar year in mid-winter is perhaps the most unusual of our beginnings. Unlike our springtime or September start where we look forward, it is in this winter new-years where we spend the most time looking backward. This is the time for reflection. Like your own face reflected in the winter darkened living room window. We find our gaze pointed into our past.
we remind ourselves of where we have just come from. We all look back. ‘This year in review’ is Journalism 101 – at no other time of year are Bush, Brittany and Borat so frequently collaged together to share the same magazine frontpage.
