The Best Day to Begin

Is this a work day or still a holiday? I suppose it depends where you work. If you work for yourself, you could take the day off. It was rainy and I remember all those days in the past when I worked for someone else and only dreamed of spending a rainy afternoon in bed with a good book. Today was my chance.

This is traditionally a dreary time of year. There are no more holiday goodies to nibble on, using the excuse that it's a temporary, seasonal disregard for the usual diet. The oceans of little white lights that make the darkness seem less dreary are all gone. And in fact the days are still remarkably short. They'll be noticeably longer in another four weeks.

When you work in an office, the chances are you can go into the lunch room on any day before New Years Day and find homemade fudge, brownies, cookies, cake. Our old daisy wheel printer was located in the kitchen/lunch room. My office was up one flight of stairs. Everytime I needed to print out a document, I had to walk downstairs to retrieve it. And when I'd get to the kitchen, there were the goodies. At the beginning of the season, I continued to bring my lunch each day. But after awhile, I'd just count on eating baked goods.

It seemed I was the only one who could "fix" that old printer when it went offline. I trained various people downstairs to do exactly what I did, but it never worked. I would go down and turn it off first. Then the paper might be out of alignment so that when you printed your document, the perforation would fall in exactly the middle of your page. Another thing that use to happen was that the printer seemed to ignore the orientation of the daisy wheel, so it printed gibberish. It was "speaking" some outlandish language.

In December, walking down to fuss with the printer wasn't so bad. But as soon as January came around, there were no goodies to provide a collateral benefit. That's when you might try to retain some feeling of the season by going to the snack bar and buying a snack that you hoped would resemble a holiday treat, but I never found that successful.

My husband, who died a little over two years ago, always use to keep the decorations up until after January 6th. That is the day the three wise men arrived at the manger. I like that custom myself. It allows you to eke out a few more days. On this cold, rainy night, I think that's what I might do this year