After Christmas

Now what?

Journal: 27 December, 2024, morning.

Come, sit with me for a while with our coffee and let’s talk about ordinary things.

Yesterday I mopped the floor after vacuuming everything. I love the fragrance of a freshly mopped floor and for so many times I’ve totally lost count, I celebrated that we decided to have all tile floors downstairs with only area rugs here and there. I love the lemony fragrance of the floor cleaner and the meditativeness of the process. I’m not sure what this says about me, but most of my meditativeness happens during cleaning. I just lose myself in the repetitiveness of the motions and it’s so peaceful.

Waking up to a freshly scrubbed and clean house is absolutely wonderful. Unfortunately, to my continuing sorrow, I cannot clean the world, but I can clean my floors and I take great pleasure in doing that. Cleaning is best done when you are the only one in the house and Tom was in the barn and the kids went shopping and so there was just me and Henri and he retreated to the farthest corner he could find in the house, disliking the vacuum cleaner as dogs generally do.

We are in that wonderful phase of post Christmas that involves eating all the leftovers from the feast of cooking that we always do, and it is such a pleasure. It will end, of course, around New Year’s Day when we will get out the big pot and have Black Eyed Peas and ham and cornbread and then it will be January, the month of atonement. I’m laughing, but it is true, you know. First the excess, followed by the apologetic atonement for all that excess, and then around the beginning of February, we settle out into some sort of balance which doesn’t deny the pleasure of delightful foods, but promises the healthful benefits of not completely overindulging for the remainder of the year. Yes, it’s a little bit boring, but good habits are often that way. 

Indulge. Repent. Correct. Repeat.

Such is life.

And now I must stop and and do the few things necessary to prepare myself for early Mass, which begins again today on this Friday morning after Christmas. We are now in the traditional 12 days of Christmas in which the feeling and spirit and mood of that holy celebration linger until Epiphany, and how I wish it could linger for the rest of the year. Once a year, I observe the outpouring of good wishes and love and charity and laughter and pleasure in each other’s company and then it is gone, put back on the shelf until the next Christmas. Imagine what it would be like if we were all like that every day. Well. It’s a lovely thought, isn’t it? Maybe we can work on that this year.

This has been a pleasure. Let’s do it again, shall we?

#journalingalife