Around Christmas, time is strange.
We go to bed late. We get up early because, despite the absence of work, there is still way too much work to do.
Even the days of the week cease to have meaning. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday give way to Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, as time acquires a pleasing kind of elasticity.
Days are longer; evenings longer still. In my childhood home, the gap between Dinner and Presents lasted for a geological age. The Cretaceous period was shorter than that couple of hours.
And, weirdly, in all these ample, comfortable days of time stretched and misshapen like a stocking on Christmas morning, surrounded by the people we love, the distant past seems closer than last week. Christmases pile in on us, so present, so immediate, so full of everyone we ever cared for, that decades seem no longer than the time it takes to pop out and put the kettle on.
And then December 27th arrives.
Not Christmas Eve. Not Christmas Day. Not Boxing Day. Just December 27th.
December 27th brings the worry that time is ordinary again, with only New Year standing between us and cold January, flat and full of dark and work and flu.
But December 27th is not ordinary. Christmas has only got as far as three French hens.
Even so, December 27th does beg the question of where we will be when our true love has stopped sending inconveniently large gifts.
Christians have a habit of stitching the long term into their prayers. Even ‘give us today our daily bread’ ends with a reminder that we, and God, are in this ‘forever and ever’.
Which holds out the hope that when ordinary time does finally come, and we find ourselves apart again from the people, perhaps the one person, we love, we will still be loved.
And unlike Christmas, ordinary time lasts. In its steady rhythms is the slow return of light and when, in nine days time, it is finally Not Christmas, the last partridge roasted and the last pear poached, we will be glad of that.
But for now, Happy December 27th.
It is after all only the third day of Christmas and there is still time for true love this year.
And next year. And forever and ever. Amen.
Amen.
The image is a detail from Still Life with Pears and a Pitcher by Paul Cezanne, oil on canvas, 1894 (Private Collection).