December 15, 20XX
My Dear Lucilius:
I have now set out the Nativity sets, strung the felt ornaments from the bookshelves, and even put out my very small battery powered Christmas tree – 6 inches in height – with its even smaller lights which twinkle. My stocking is hung with about as much care as I give it.
I have not decorated so greatly in years.
Why, you might ask? One rather straightforward reason is that one does not know if Christmas will come next year – or perhaps more accurately, if one will be around to celebrate Christmas. A rather morbid thought given the season I am sure, but a rather accurate one. A great many people celebrating Christmas this year will likely not be here for the next. No reason to hoard decorations at this point. That “better Christmas” may never come.
The other reason is simply to have Christmas.
Christmas – stripped of what we have made it with decorations and lights and rather sappy carols about how our true love abandoned us on this very night – was originally (and still is for Christians) a celebration of the birth of Christ, a foundational moment in our religion. Current circumstances do not change that – Christmas has come and gone through previous years filled with famine and plague, war and death. But Christmas, as that wise sage Dr. Seuss said, came. It came all the same.
In fact, for the bulk of Christian history, Christmas was scarcely recognizable from the many other feast days and celebrations – yes, depending on where you were you could inherit local traditions (the Yule Log, for example), but nothing like what we had up to last year. The point was to celebrate the birth of Christ, not general feelings of goodwill and giving and what is in it for me.
And so I decorate not knowing what the future will hold, only knowing that Christmas is indeed coming.
Although the goose will not be getting fat this year. A little deer jerky and a trout will have to suffice.
Your Obedient Servant, Seneca
Live Life Like There Is No Tomorrow. And give this Thanksgiving a more humble meaning. Its been a rough year for everybody.
ReplyDeleteThis year should make us more thankful, should it not?
DeleteI had not caught the numbering before, but the sequential entry 'LIV' - seems strangely apropos.
Thanks for stopping by!
I think the first post I read on your blog was one of these and so I have been in a state of confusion until I happened to notice the Page title the Collapse to the right and read the first couple posts. I now understand.
ReplyDeleteMy neighbor is a romance novelist of some fame and although I have no interest in writing romance novels, I would like to write a book some day. Perhaps the best way is to just practice like what you are doing and see if it eventually goes somewhere.
Ed, I can completely understand how you would be confused. I forget that sometimes people walk in the middle of something. Occasionally I should be reminded to provide context.
ReplyDeleteI have written books in two ways. The first is setting aside time and muscling through it. I will say that this does work when I have "flow"; it also requires setting aside sections of time which I may or may not have. I will say that writing this way certainly evens the load. It also lets one experiment and see where one goes.
If you are thinking of writing, a great exercise to force yourself to do it is participate in Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month), a completely free exercise which happens in November and is a project where thousands of people write a 50,000 word novel in a month. It is 1666.66 words a day. I have completed it once - it is quite a sense of satisfaction when you are done. https://nanowrimo.org/
I actually did that over 17 years ago when I first started blogging. I thoroughly enjoyed the exercise. Unfortunately that blog is no longer though I still have the story preserved on my hard drive.
DeleteThat is always my biggest worry - I had items I wrote 30 years ago on a different operating system I can no longer access.
DeleteConsidering the uncertainty that the future holds, Seneca could be writing to us as well.
ReplyDeleteLeigh, Seneca seems like some kind of philosophical genius. When I grow up, I want to be him.
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