The Supputation of the Year

New years are interesting things. The supputation  of the year always brings  that sneaking suspicion that you should have made some sort of resolution, despite the knowledge that most resolutions are neatly sundered by the end of the first week of January, but it can also be an infinitely depressing time.  The cheerful, twinkling decorations that made the gloomy evenings bearable are dismantled and put away carefully, so that next December they can be brought out again and marvelled at for not working, despite functioning perfectly when you put them away. But somehow, fixing any broken ones this year doesn't seem the thing to do.

And then there's the tree. Few artefacts of Christmas are mulled over, worked on, debated about and generally fiddled with as much as the tree. The debates start early;  should we go for a synthetic, a traditional needle-shedding, insect-ridden, sap-oozing Douglas Fir or perhaps invest in the pricier, slightly bluer but nicer-smelling Noble? When you've browsed the nurseries, grumbling about the exorbitant prices this year, found one that seems absolutely perfect, taken it to the chap who then feeds it into some device which covers it in fish netting and makes you wonder if they do a model specifically for young children, proffered the credit card and listened for the faint screams, tugged, wheeled, pushed and persuaded the thing into the car and driven it home, the fun really starts.

But despite the sweat, toil and tears, it can look wonderful in the corner of the room, before it's festooned with a thousand baubles, beads, lametta strings, lights and other trinkets, effectively concealing it almost completely and making you wonder if a simple set of coat hangers wouldn't suffice next year.

Curiously, we also seem to hear of deaths at Christmas. People die all the time, of course, but we seem to attach a special significance to deaths at this time of year. The removal of decorations and lights at this time does nothing to lighten the mood, as the short days will continue for some time, and any GP will tell you that January is a peak time for referrals for depressive-associated illnesses.  Of course, this could all have been at least partly avoided if those pesky MPs hadn't switched from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar in 1752 and effectively moved Christmas 11 days earlier, giving us a longer period of dark mornings and evenings after the celebrations ended, presumably so they'd be able to claim for extra lighting.

At least this year, however, Conwy is collecting the old trees for recycling,  so at least we'll be able to turf them out with a clearer conscience.