I stood looking into the same old void that always waits after the first rumblings of a new year. It was the second of January. We agreed it was time to take the Christmas things down. We said we would do it carefully. Without panic. Without pain. When the urge comes, it is best to act. Waiting never improves it.
The great season of excess and indulgence had passed. It had been loud and soft at the same time. Full and empty. Meaningful and meaningless in equal measure. It showed, perfectly, how lost we are, though not in any new way. There is no going back from it. So we buried it where it belonged. It wasn’t a bad Christmas. It was ordinary. A fair measure of the familiar things our small world always manages to produce.
With the right frame of mind, the hard work does not feel hard. We treated it like a task worth doing well. The lifting. The folding. The careful removal of tinsel and ornaments. Outside, the tide came in and erased our tracks and foot prints. The pale winter sun sat low and tried its best. It almost warmed us. Almost was just enough.
We breathed in, slowly.
We sang a Joan Baez organising song, softly and without irony.
We stopped and thought about things, then let them go.
I climbed a step ladder and felt better, in every sense.
We exchanged observations that did not need answers.
We untangled the cables. We did it patiently.
We breathed out longer than we breathed in.
We noticed there was less to pack away than last year and felt a quiet victory in that.
We freed the real tree from its stand and carried it back to the real garden, into the real cold. Everything felt unusually solid and true. As if the world, for once, was not pretending.
We spread brandy butter on baked things and ate them without ceremony.
I ate the blue cheese, though it had gone a little too far.
I used the dustpan instead of the hoover.
Silence mattered.
I wore plimsolls.
We kept the room calm. We kept ourselves calm.
When the boxes were full of wires and gnomes, paper and stars, baubles and switches, we sealed them and sent them away to wherever such things wait. They will not return until around the thirteenth of December, 2026. I thought that sounded like a long time. I thought, briefly, that I might join them there.