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| Some local snowdrops yesterday |
I set great store by snowdrops. They hang out underground all year, then they stick their tiny heads up just when we need them most. Hey! they say. You've nearly done another winter. Well done you. It will get brighter later, but for now, see how much hope you can find in our bursts of tiny whiteness.
Around Ecoville there is abundant woodland, some of which we own and manage. After we moved in, we (not us personally, there are many sizes of we around here) cleared a patch of gloomy leylandii just by our houses and uncovered an old woodland garden stuffed full of bulbs. Some hundreds, if not thousands, of them are snowdrops, and they're almost ready to pop.
And I am so ready for them. I'm actually not minding January too much, it has a minimalism that I can get behind (we're eating a lot of Japanese food, clearing out cupboards, and generally being sober). It's December I'm needing to get over, December and all who sailed in her.
I meant to follow up a little 'turkey and the patriarchy' rant last month, but I never got around to it, and it went off the boil. But it started simmering again when I heard an item on Woman's Hour earlier this month about the Irish tradition of Little Christmas, also known as Women's Christmas.
Essentially (and I'm not saying I don't approve) this is a day in early January when Irish women go off and do something nice together on their own, to recover from Big Christmas, on the grounds that it is, overwhelmingly, them (us) who take the emotional, logistical and physical responsibility for the Most Wonderful Time Of The Year.
Hmm. There are things I like about Big Christmas. I like the cards - not the ones you get from hotels you've stayed in or from financial advisors, but the ones you get from your friends, especially when you recognise their handwriting on the envelope from all the letters you used to write each other in the days when that's how staying in touch was done. I like sending them, and I like receiving them. I like carols, especially the ones with descants in, and I have a life-long love of fairy lights. And I remember the excitement of being a child at Christmas, decorating the tree, putting presents under it, staring at them for days.
But I'd happily leave it at that, maybe minus most of the presents (I don't actually need anything and neither do most of the people I know). And I've kind of tried to, but I'm not allowed.
Christmas is relentless - the build up, the pressure, the consumption, the long distance travelling when it's cold, dark and generally inhospitable time, the waste. The energy. You can do it on someone else's terms, as I suppose we all do when we're children, or you can take on hosting and organising yourself, which isn't for everyone, but does give you some kind of control of the situation.
On the whole, I prefer the latter, and M loves to cook, so for the last n years we've done some version of that*, but the 2016 version wiped me out, and I put in a 2017 bid for ignoring the whole thing. And I honestly tried, but I would have had to have barricaded myself in my bedroom for the duration to avoid every festivity (which, you know, brings its own issues), so I did find myself in various Christmas type situations.
And overwhelmingly, I observed (with varying degrees of grace) that they represent a shit-ton of work, and that most of that work is done by women. Now you could argue that we could all sit on our hands and eventually the planning, the shopping, the wrapping, the table-setting, the scene-setting, the serving, the clearing would get done anyway. And there are times when I deliberately do this. But I find it really hard, because I can see that there are things that need to be done, and I am amazed at the proportion of men (#notallmen, do not @ me) who somehow don't.
I absolutely refuse to believe that this is nature rather than nurture, indeed I seem to remember learning it. And if I managed to unlearn it, I would only become part of the problem.
But my real beef is why exactly are we doing this in the first place? Who benefits, exactly? I think pretty much the whole business is the Emperor's New Jumper, nothing but market-based tinsel-covered displacement activity, covering the gaping hole in our souls.
And we let it control us, and deplete us, and we watch it happen, and we just somehow don't call it out. Well, I'm over it. I've said it before but I mean it this time.
Well, that's better out than in. Happy January!
joella
*ok, tbf there was a Christmas in a caravan a few years ago which was lovely. There's a way.
