interregnum

Like a lot of people I know, I find the four weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas a pretty awful time of the year. It's dark, it's cold, and there's much too much to do -- too many parties to attend, too many presents to buy and ship, too many relatives to remember -- when really all I want to do is watch sports on TV, read books (in bed) and sleep. This year, though, after reading my daughter's explanation of why so many people are affected by the midwinter blahs, I realized that there's one part of this crummy season I've always overlooked: the week between Christmas and New Year. During this week, no one really works, as far as I can see. The streets are almost empty. There are plenty of parking spaces in my neighborhood. I get almost no phone calls asking me when this or that script will be done. Work-related emails drop to a trickle.

Nice. I'm starting to think of it as The Interregnum... a little piece of peace crunched between the dead old year we've just been through and the potentially horrifying year to come.

So, starting now, I'm going to celebrate The Interregnum by taking to my bed, turning off the phone, and assembling the books I want to read (and the TV remotes) on my bedside table. Then I'll make some cocoa, and just hang out for one blessed week without giving one single thought to all the productive things I could be doing instead. Almost unnoticeably, the days will start getting longer, and sometime in mid-February we'll get one of those 60 degree days that fools the jonquils into blooming and fools me into pulling the golf clubs out of the closet, and before I know it, it will be spring.

Yay.