Christmas is Over—Now What?

Now that the Big Day has finally come—and gone—that seasonal holiday let-down may now begin. For some, the celebration comes with lots of noise and commotion as people try to cram an entire family reunion into one brief day. For others, well, it was a lot of work to get here…now, it’s time for a break!

No matter what kind of day yours turned out to be—and I hope it was everything you hoped for—you undoubtedly have plans for the days in what seems to be the lull between Christmas and New Year.

That week between the two holidays has always been special to me. I rather like the quiet of it. Back where I grew up—on the east coast, where one actually could enjoy a white Christmas—everything naturally looked so Christmasy that people didn’t mind carrying on the holiday spirit just one more week. It was a chance to settle down and enjoy all the decorations we’d worked so hard to put up, both inside and outside—instead of tossing the haggard old tree out at curbside for the refuse collection the very next day, California style.

At work—at least back when people still used paper calendars—during the years when I didn’t get to take off for the week, I took the opportunity of the relative peace in the office to settle down and set up my upcoming year’s calendar. I removed the old year—carefully binding up the records and setting them aside for future reference, just in case there ever was a question leading me back to the documents—and installed the fresh page-a-day calendar in its holder, and the month-at-a-glance poster on a nearby wall.

Then, I’d pull out my portable week-at-a-glance schedule book and color-code in all my regular meetings. By the time my upcoming year was marked, tabbed and documented, it was time to ring in that new year in earnest.

Perhaps you see that hiatus between Christmas and New Year in a different light. Let me assure you: I certainly don’t go through all that effort anymore, myself—I’m quite glad to succumb to the convenience of accessing a cloud-based calendar app on my iPad. But the practice did introduce me to the concept of taking some time for introspection and year-end review in the last week of December.

In this last week of the year, I’d like to do the same here on A Family Tapestry. We’ll take a breather from the story of Charles Broyles and the search for the matchmaker who connected his brother Thomas with his Georgia-born bride. I’ll share a few items from family collections that seemed too incidental to fit into any family series. At the same time, I’ll be adjusting some details on the blog that, well, I’ve just meant to do for such a long time. If there ever was a good time for housekeeping items like that, this would be the week.