Speculative calendars

The end of the year always drains away. It feels as if Halloween is the plug that lets that bathwater of the calendar start to rush out in an unstoppable torrent of momentum and pressure. And then as soon as the new year hits, that momentum dissipates like the dew on a sunny summer morning.

Unfortunately for those of us in the northern hemisphere, we are left with two, three, sometimes more months of cold, wet, and dark and little occasion to mark the passing of time. In older traditions people referred to winter as a nameless time. It was an ordeal. Something that was weather and survived. It’s an apt description of those first months of the year. The merry making is over, and only a cold stew of mud is left to wallow through on our way to warmer and brighter days.

It makes me wonder why aren’t more holidays spread out a bit to help counter this. Why is Halloween only one night? Thanksgiving, the winter solstice, Christmas, all just one day. But Diwali and Hanukkah, those are a series of occasions spread out over time.

Those traditions aren’t my own, but seen from afar, I wonder if more folks adopted those sorts of frameworks for their own celebrations and remembrances, especially during the dark times of the year, if they wouldn’t all be somewhat less stressed and depressed. Maybe doing so would also better allow for an actual sense of peace of joy to permeate instead of a simple growing dread of having to weather more months of hard conditions with no or many fewer excuses to share in and endure them as a community.