The winter solstice is only three days away. Each day the light is less, and we stay at home near our brightly lit Christmas tree. These are days for making warming stews and drinking hot chocolate.
I look forward to the annual jigsaw puzzle time that is coming. After we've eaten the big turkey dinner I cook each Christmas for the family, I go into a state of total relaxation. That's when I like to hunker down over a jigsaw puzzle.
Nobody cooks for a couple of days; we all relax into our favourite activities, and as tummies dictate, we make turkey pickle cranberry sandwiches or simply enjoy a warmed up plate of leftovers.
Today I finished work for the term, and we held a luncheon party to celebrate our outgoing department head. Except for the office cleanup, which I plan to do on Wednesday, the term's work is done.
As I have nothing terribly pressing to do tomorrow, will stay home, cook my stuffed eggplants, and then lie back on the sofa and finish reading the latest Anne Perry mystery. Every so often I will look up at the gorgeously lit Christmas tree, and pet the cat if he deigns to come and lie on my lap. Absolute bliss.
The jigsaw, however, is not allowed out till Boxing Day for the very good
reason that I will become totally engrossed and
pore over it for hours every day. While others rush around to the Boxing Day sales that have sprung up in recent years, I reach back to an older tradition. When I was a kid, that was when we went skating, played with our new toys, and read our new books, and yes, started a jigsaw puzzle.
The joy of my jigsaw downtime is very precious. It can only happen in that very special week between Christmas and New Years, when everything seems to stop for a few days of home, family and rest, before things gear up again in the New Year.
This is 2012, but I'm not concerned about the end-of-the-world predictions based on the Mayan calendar. Such predictions of doom have a long history. For some reason, such ideas seem to appeal to the human psyche.
When I was at university in the late sixties, two friends and I agreed to meet at the Tower of London on March 15, 1984, an earlier occasion when the world was supposed to end. Even at the time, we thought it was more of a laugh than a threat. Of course, we were young; 1984 seemed a long way off.
Late in 1999, when Y2K was considered a serious threat, a friend told me he decided not to send his wife and children on a holiday to Cuba because he feared that the airline computers would crash and prevent them from returning. A systems analyst himself, my friend had to work, so he couldn't go with his family to Cuba and take his chances.
Y2K turned out to be mainly a marketing opportunity. Everyone had to get a new computer, or hire someone to fix their old one so it wouldn't crash.
Like Sam Dwyer, I prefer to see the Mayan end of the world prophecy as another in a long series of false alarms. I hope and believe that humans are evolving. Next year, we'll once again have a chance to make a new start. We can work harder to appreciate our blessings, and treat our families, our neighbours and our planet better than ever before.
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