Photos and thoughts from December that were a little thin for their own posts.
With the absence of almost everything that defines the holidays for me, I tried to bring more ritual into my home. I observed Winter Solstice for the first time. I left a lit (flameless) candle in the window all night. I made a list of everything I wished to leave behind me and burned it. Unfortunately, there seems to be a 50/50 split on whether or not burning the list of leave-behinds destroys them or releases them into the universe to manifest. Yay? In any case, welcome back, sun. I missed you. On Christmas Eve, I watched a beautiful Candlelight church service.
Once again, we welcomed the return of Sloth Week. WM and I don’t return to work until Monday, January 4th.
I observed the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn from my front lawn! My binoculars allowed me to see the moons, but you could clearly see the 2 planets without any magnification at all. The big blurry dot is Jupiter. The smaller blurry dot is Saturn.
From Twitter:
This year’s Christmas cookies were: snickerdoodles, sugar drop cookies, chocolate crinkles, pinwheels, and peanut butter blossoms. I made a batch of each of them early on to mail to friends. We sent them Priority Mail on 12/11/20 and some are still in the Philadelphia USPS distribution facility. Which, great. Louis DeJoy can eat glass. I made another round of batches the week of Christmas.
The lovely Kristen bought us this gorgeous ornament for Christmas with a sentiment we can all agree with.
The Duolingo streak continues, but the NYT Crossword puzzle streak was blown in December on a puzzle I struggled with for over an hour and a half.
And I rededicated myself to writing on a regular basis. I published only 85 blog posts in 2020 but 65 of them were in the last 6 months of the year. This blog turned 18 years old yesterday.
That, friends, wraps it up for 2020. I know that the changing of the year is merely symbolic and won’t change the mess that we’re in. This year has knocked us for so much of a loop that I shouldn’t say that this one will be better. There is a lot of work to be done to undo many of the policies that have resulted in the systemic racial and economic injustices that have caused the suffering of so many. And people continue to die of COVID – 341,000 in the USA and 1.7 MILLION worldwide. But…
I have hope.
Though hope is frail, it’s hard to kill.
Need some more email in your life? If you’re a regular reader but forget to check in, you can subscribe to a once-a-week email with links to the week’s posts! Click here to sign up!
