The Vineyards

In the last few years, I have been trying to write at least one post each month. I often fail. Of course, most failures are carefully hidden by altering the date of publication and soon enough not even I remember I missed the day. Always at war with Eurasia, by the way.

This monthly schedule had a clear impact on the themes I talk about. It makes it pointless to write about recent events, so the majority of posts from the last two or three years are memories and thoughts about the world or my own situation or something like that. But talking about myself in the last few days of December seemed too selfish, while everyone worried about Christmas and New Year and wishing each other peace and happiness and whatnot. So in the last two years I boarded the wagon and wrote cute (cute?) posts about how this is a fun and good time of the year, even for those people to whom religious dates are meaningless and New Year means only a different number on the calendar.

And it is a good time. For kids, there is a long vacation and a new classroom in school, perhaps even a whole new school – or maybe college. (For kids here, at least, where they figured the school year had no business matching up to the harvests.) For people who work, it is a few days off and a bit of extra money. For many people, it is the time to see relatives they rarely see. (And I know so many would rather be alone, but really, let those who enjoy it just enjoy it; pretend you miss them and are having fun until the next day, when you can post all about the soul-tearing pain and agony in your Tumblr, with a caption in Helvetica over a picture in sepia.) Sidetracked.

But, see, this year, I did lack the time to write this post. It was an extremely busy month. In fact, I only stopped working an hour ago and will continue to work tomorrow morning. I came home on the 23rd and, aside from sleeping, I worked for all but some twenty hours, maybe less. Relatives were getting angry, even, that I was never there for the festivities. Many things went wrong in the last two or three months, so to put things back on track and not carry this mess into 2011 we all made an agreement at work, and hopefully we will have extra free days along the year. All good, I like what I do.

Still, lack of time was not the only thing that kept me from writing. There was just a general lack of this End of Year spirit from other years. And not only because I was working, it was already weird before. I do not recall seeing Christmas ads on TV, for example. (And the social nucleus is facing severe Manhattan Project.) The only time it felt like Christmas was one afternoon when I sat in the living room and just looked at the Christmas tree for a good half hour. We have a beautiful tree this year, it is almost unfair for it to be used in such a non-Christmas’esque Christmas.

This lack of spirit is disturbing. 2010 barely existed: it had eight or nine months at best, no way it had twelve. I expect someone to come up tomorrow and say “sorry, we pulled too many pages from the calendar last time, 2010 still has two months to go”. I would absolutely believe it, it would make perfect sense.

Just in case that does not happen, however, I hope you all had fun this year, and have even more fun in the next. Health and riches and peace and love, everyone is probably already wishing you that, so I wish you have fun. Enjoy it. Happy New Year. :)