Falkabarn

(actually published on night two, whatever)

I need a sitteunderlag or something.

It’s a balmy 18 fahrenheit after single digits at night where a man who propositioned me grumpily texts me that he’d rather be in Alaska. (Fair enough, as it was 7° here, 14° there.) I’ve just hacked away a ~2″ layer of iced snow to sweep away the foot of powder underneath so I can have a cigarette on the balcony, on a spot just big enough to sit cross-legged. Somehow the cold is worse when I’m standing outside at ground level on shoveled brick. I don’t think hard enough about physics and chemistry to want to sort that out.

At least the weather is appropriate. When the sun goes down it will be the first night of Jólablót and I get to sit down to a rare extravagant dinner. I sat quietly through the fuss of Xmas and noncommittally helped myself to antipasto that my brother in law brought over, and a bûche de Noël made by my sister in law and humored My mother’s requests for decor opinions while she put together three different trees.

My only yule decoration is a plastic garland of iridescent snowflakes I bought in the post-Xmas sales, and I have no idea where to put it. I had ideas about wrapping it around a tension rod to jam in the deep windowsill where I have Loki’s altar, but couldn’t find one small enough and didn’t have the energy to locate one that wasn’t holding up a very dead, dried out kokedama that I’m not ready to talk myself into composting.

Turns out having a cryptic mood disorder (cryptic because it might not actually be a mood disorder) and trying to cultivate moss that needs regular dunking are not a good mix. Who would have thought Apparently not me.

I want to be excited because this means it’s finally my turn to have a holiday, but mostly I just feel more of the same dragging isolation that I’ve been feeling for months on end.

Common sense dictates that this should be treated and managed as a Me problem. Growing up I saw plenty of movies where some curmudgeonly noncooperator abstains from Xmas or resents it, but through the magic of community and lazily secularized wonder they realize they’re in the wrong and join in. At this point I’d like to see a movie where the protagonist learns there’s other people in the world who do shit differently, managing to be fully realized humans without someone else’s holidays and they experience joy and wonder about that. Because as an adult, and as a Heathen, it seems like I still can’t catch a fucking break because I don’t do anything for the solstice and people get bizarrely defensive about it.

The only deviation from that kind of response so far was a friend saying, “oh, you’re like, hardcore about it” when I mentioned sticking to lunisolar dates instead of solstices and equinoxes. Not even snarky. Mostly just surprised to encounter it in the wild.

Certainly, using a lunisolar calendar is a choice. Not the shady Twitterspeak “A Choice,” but just one option out of several available. Turns out the explanation is as simple as trying it out one year and finding it felt like it made more sense since it properly feels like winter when you do it well after the solstice. (And then properly feels like spring, and then summer, and then fall, etc.).

Leaving an increasingly dysfunctional group and losing a lot of extended community, also a choice. But it’s not like there were viable alternatives.

That second one is the kicker for me. Holidays take fucking work. The food doesn’t cook itself and any ceremony doesn’t hold itself. I remember a Twitter reply that pissed me off because some stranger scolded me for saying as much, because “honoring the gods isn’t that hard.”

Girl, whatever. Perhaps I want something nice that provides some sense of completion. Perhaps, getting no fucking help with that makes it hard. I am no longer in a situation where I can tap someone for an extra set of hands.

Partway through writing this I take a break to scoop away more snow and realize that I had stashed the lid of a $5 hardware store bucket on the balcony. My very own find of a sitteunderlag. How recon. The bloggable, inspiring metaphor here is some bullshit about having the power within myself all along. I put up the damn garland.

It’s not as sparkly as I was anticipating. But the disco ball garland I was eyeing wouldn’t have made sense anyway, and I am still in the habit of avoiding shiny things because it used to annoy my dog, even though he’s been dead for almost a year. So whatever.

Eventually I realize I’m mad about my hair being greasy and take a shower. My alarm alerting me I have ~20 minutes before sunset goes off while I’m rinsing and I throw dinner together with wet hair.

The one consistent thing I do for Jólablót is splurge on an entire side of sockeye salmon and try to pair it with vegetables that are locally available at this time of year, because to me, the seasonality is kind of the whole point.

Halfway through my plate I realize I’ve managed to become 80% less mad at everything because the problem solving involved in making food made me feel like a real person again.

I am still 20% bitter bitch but at least I’m full of salmon.