to swell so high that I may drown me in you

It is a perfect pre-holiday Monday: the sky is a grim iron-gray and it isn't raining so much as it is weeping. It is just chilly enough to require a sweater, just cool enough to claw a bit at your soul. A soft sort of coldness: not the sharp iciness that could destroy, but a nagging lack of warmth that presses one down.

I think the best holidays, like the best parties, require dark and gloom and difficulty. A summer party is, of course, just fine, as are any summer holidays (and I am, I suppose, separating what need not be kept separate: parties and holidays can of course coincide). But to prepare in the cold, in the dark, a celebratory feast demands one bring devotion and desire. One must resist inertia like any artist and make something appear where little was.

Setting the table is difficult enough on the best of days. It is too easy to forget that each meal is already a gift, already a sign of love. To rally and remember--to remember to remember--the blessing every meal is is an accomplishment. And it is the darkness, the gloom, the endless night against which our winter holidays flare out that helps one--that helps me--to see at all the great achievements gratitude and celebration are.

A celebration--a real celebration--is a charge, a determined stance against nothingness. To celebrate is not to turn away from the darkness, the nothingness, as if to pretend that one doesn't see it. It is to displace the nothingness with something bright and hot and sparkling. This is why I love the winter holidays; they blaze so clearly, so definitely and defiantly against the bleakness that threatens life. A full, rich life is a celebratory life, a life that creates, a life that pours out devotion and desire. I need the coldness, the bare darkness, the howling wintry-ness, the breath-sucking gloom to feel this, to remember.

"play louder. you will not succeed."

Of course, Margaret Atwood gets at the beauty of winter even better than I do:

"But still there’s a sense of anticipation: you tense for the combat."

                                                                      —The Blind Assassin

That's part of what I love: the fight. You rally, you muster all the strength, all the courage, all the endurance and you fight the cold, the dark, the bare, the desolation; you fight death. Every act is tattered flag waving brightly against the surrendered world: I'm here! I'm still here! I'm alive and you can't catch me!

William Carlos Williams beat me to that, too:

Again I reply to the triple winds

running chromatic fifths of derision

outside my window:

Play louder.

You will not succeed. I am

bound more to my sentences

the more you batter at me

to follow you.

And the wind,

as before, fingers perfectly

its derisive music.

I am not good at fighting, at rallying. As soon as things get hard, I sigh to myself "I want to go home." Still, I love it. I love it in other people and I thrill at the hope I might become able to do it myself. Winter, with its bleak black-and-whiteness, turns the world into a morality play where evil is everywhere and obvious. In the face of obvious evil, what else can one do but fight?