9: Four in the afternoon

All day twilight. 

Day nine is gazing wistfully at warmly lit afternoon/evening windows, and dreaming of soup.

1: Advent part deux

To build a fire. 

Regular readers of this blog (hello Mom!) will recall that last year I devoted an inordinate amount of time to a virtual Advent calendar.

I would like to do the same thing this year, albeit on a smaller budget and for more austere times. So I will post one Advent photo every day in December.

Friends: here's an open invitation from my HQ to yours to create and share your own Advent photo calendar. Fill it with a daily picture, a daily thought, total nonsense, whatever.

Here's the first of my Christmas lights - a luminaria from last Christmas Eve.

By the way, you might be interested to find out that 'austere' is actually an old Saxon word that means fewer frills and a lot more crap.

The long dark tea-time of the year

I witnessed a good omen at the crack of midnight. As London fireworks freckled the perennial cloud cover orange, a neighbor set loose four little fire balloons into the night. The sky rose up to meet them as they glided, hopeful, unashamed, brilliant, out into the big world. I watched in childish wonder, having never seen such a thing before. After a pause, my neighbor unleashed a fifth balloon. This left me a bit worried.

At first light. 

As we enter the year of the skint rabbit, and in keeping with the general mood of austerity and blerg, I'd like to raise a modest sidecar toast to your coming 365 days in an appropriately downbeat but affordably hopeful manner:

May the pot-holey road rise up to meet you and may fowl economic winds always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face when you dream, while in reality the rain falls soft upon your cramped bedsit. May your year not suffer excessively for the excesses of years past. And until we meet again, may you hold your dear ones in the palm of your heart, and never tire of eating tinned beans together by candlelight. 

Christmas is long unwrapped. Crackers cracked. Turkeys gobbled. Household alcohol, sugar and butter reserves are at record lows. But in the silver linings department, waistlines remain plentiful. This may be the case for some time to come, as New Year resolutions were axed in an effort to incur savings at the Department of Introspective Affairs.

Midwinter is so very bleak. January actually means 'a month-long graveyard shift'. Seriously—check the Dictionary of Mañana. But complainers like me have been complaining thus for at least as long as women have been having children. And I know that spring will ultimately bloom again, and my sense of optimism will simultaneously emerge from the dark. In the meantime, winter takes advance payment for those finite, perfect sunny days ahead at the height of summer.

The cure for the blergs. 

Now I understand why my Scandinavian ancestors braved all manner of adversity to migrate a little closer to the equator. I suspect they are laughing at me through time and space for doing just the opposite. That said, I have high hopes that this year will be brighter and sail higher than the last one, for all four of us here at Chaos HQ.

Humbug. Happy New Year.

24: Luz

It's Christmas Eve, the big Advent enchilada, and all I got left is sand, votive candles, and a bunch of brown paper sacks. Pretty humble ingredients, but believe me they collaborate to create the warmest glow in the known galaxy.

Home, where no storm clouds rise.

Luminarias, or farolitos if you prefer, get plonked out every Christmas Eve on the house, the yard, the fence, the chicken coop, the llama barn, or whatever. As any rural New Mexican (which is to say most New Mexicans) will tell you, it can be quite a job if you live on a big plot and have a bunch of sand you need to get rid of.

Budget beacons.

Luminarias, the story goes, are points of light after dark to guide the holy family home. So a landing strip on a shoestring, circa 1AD. 

Most every Christmas, I find myself standing at the end of a luminaria-lit path in the dark just before midnight. At this moment, no matter where I am (there have been a few places now), I always feel like I have found my way home at the end of a long year out in the big world.   

7: Light

Day 7 of December in pictures.

Star of wonder. 

Wonderful things are born in the darkness of power outages—new children are dreamed up and the children already with us discover candlelight.

Beauty bright.