Winter Light

Processing a request for The Dreaded Feast:  Writers on Enduring the Holidays, (Abrams, 2009), I thought of Peter Maling, author of the splendid but now moribund Naked Blog.  For Peter, the holidays were a terrible ordeal until, finally, they ceased to be.  And then there is the old AA joke that alcoholism is a threefold disease:  Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's.

After my mother died in 2009, we have not had big family get-togethers at Thanksgiving or Christmas.  R. and I eat Thanksgiving dinner with friends at Wakulla Lodge. Christmas has become for us more of a church-centered feast-day.  We haven't bought a tree for a couple of years

Ellyn von Huben writes about what she calls HallowthanksgivingChristmaspalooza at The Word On Fire Blog.

My desire at this point is block out all of the Black Friday and Christmas chaos swirling around me. Not only is there the need to keep Christ in Christmas, but to keep Christmas at Christmas. To keep Christmas as the twelve days from December 25 to the feast of the Epiphany - not from November 1 to December 26, when the stores open for the post-Christmas sales.