December 26, 2006
Monday
The Feast of Stephen

I cannot now find the Holidailies post that introduced me to the phrase that is the title of this piece, nor do I remember the writer’s name, so I can’t credit her. Zwischen den Jahren is German for “between the years,” and it refers not to some mystical opening in time when one can look in two directions at once but to the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day when most businesses in Germany are closed.

I used to talk about fin de l’annee, a term I created out of my limited understanding of French, to describe the same week. I intended it to mean “end of the year,” as fin de seicle means “end of the century.” For some years now these days have been something of a strange, unanchored time, a hinge between the golden glow of Christmas and the cold blue light of January, when you take up your pack and get on with your life again.

I’ve taken a few days off from Holidailies. The quality of my writing was falling off as I meandered through cloudy and clouded thoughts. Yesterday, Christmas Day, I didn’t even leave the house. I served ham and Waldorf salad buffet style in front of the TV, where we watched the Dallas Cowboys lose to the Philadelphia Eagles. I don’t care much for football, on television or live in person, but Lynn is a Cowboys fan (nobody, not even Lynn, knows exactly why), and it was fun to watch her and Ron watch the game, to hear her talk so knowledgeably about the game and about athletics in general. After that she and I watched the outtake parts of the full set of Friends episodes we got ourselves for Christmas, and played some Scene It?, a trivia game based on knowledge of the Friends oeuvre.

Today I started trying to get back to work. I wrote the letter to my college roommates that I talked about a few days ago, and got it assembled and in the mail by 4:00. It went six pages. I hope it is well-received.

In the post for this day in 2004 I quoted Frederick Buechner on why he writes about himself:

To keep track of these lives is not just a means of enriching our understanding . . . but truly a sacred work. In these pages I tell secrets about my parents, my children, myself because that is one way of keeping track and because I believe that it is not only more honest but also vastly more interesting than to pretend that I have no such secrets to tell. I not only have my secrets. I am my secrets.

I thank those who read my work, for whatever reason.

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