For your stray attention this weekend

Christmas trees, Sankta Lucia, and slow winter films

Hello,

What have I been doing this last week? It’s hard to say. Winter has slowed me down, and I spent Monday fighting to stay awake, only to find it impossible to sleep at bedtime. When the nights are as long as this, the numbers on the clock don’t matter anyway. Work has been halting, a dance between distraction and grind. At year’s end, I am limping through my to do list, willing myself to cover the essentials before everything stops for Christmas. If you want me to get something done, ask me in the summer. 

I did manage to install my Christmas tree this week, later than usual this year because H has had a cold and none of us could face the upheaval. When we finally went to choose it on Sunday, it was covered in what I thought was fake snow. ‘Nope,’ said the lad who packaged it up for me. ‘That’s real snow, all the way from Denmark. It’s the only one that hasn’t melted yet.’ That was, without doubt, the tree destined for me. Bert even managed to roll a series of tiny snowballs before it disappeared like a midwinter dream. 

I didn’t switch on the lights until St Lucy’s Day, on Wednesday. That’s partly because it’s nice to have a little ceremony in this life (my dad doesn’t even decorate his tree until Christmas Eve, but he has far more self-discipline than me), but also because, when I dug out our lights, it was clear that Fraggle had chewed through them last year. Hopefully after they’d been unplugged; she’s still alive, at any rate. There was a delay while we bought new ones. (Elf and) safety has now been restored, but I am now missing a box of red painted baubles from India and H is saying that I’ll have to do without them until we either move house or I commit to clearing out the loft, neither of which are likely to happen any time soon. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about St Lucy this week. On Friday night, I went with Rebecca Armstrong (editor of this newsletter) to St Paul’s Cathedral to attend their Sankta Lucia service. It was breathtakingly beautiful; we both cried, a lot, and well into the next day. The bringing of light into darkness is perhaps the most simple, ancient metaphor of all, the ur-symbolism that triggers a similarly intuitive response. The service opened with a prayer for peace in Israel and Palestine, and I once would have sneered at the emptiness of this gesture. But no longer. It seems to me, now, that praying together is a way of acknowledging our helplessness against these vast political and historical forces, rather than trying to call on a magical being to sort it out. Rather than an abdication of responsibility -  a handover to a higher power as we dust our hands - it cements us back to the horrors from which we turn away in despair. It reasserts a collective intent to care, to connect, to witness. It is not much, but it is more than nothing.