Day before yesterday was Generosity, better known as Christmas Day.
I have to confess I have gotten almost no gifts for anyone this year. I did make a cool Holly Days Advent calendar for Rey, which she has been really into, but all the stuff put into my Amazon cart I eventually removed. I need new knees, and my Social Security benefit isn’t gonna handle the medicare copays, so I haven’t felt able to be very generous this year. It feels pretty shitty.
I was trying to write careful and well-crafted posts here, which felt sort of generous; you know, sharing my ideas with others, but then looked at the stats and was heartbroken to see that only a couple of folks were reading the post, which made my writing feel more self indulgent than generous. Just one more axis of feeling lost I guess, and so I gave up. But, I have written a post for each Holly Day for about the past 5 years, and I felt like I needed to follow through for my own sake and my spiritual investment in this holiday and the process of personal and social contemplation I hoped it would establish.
And it has, at least for me. Even if Holly Days turns out to be an arrogant self indulgent exercise, it has become an fairly embedded part of my identity, and to abandon it feels like self betrayal. So for as much as I have always thought of it as a gift that I was building for my family and for posterity, I’m okay with it being just my thing, even if I am disappointed and feel a little foolish that it is not any sort of gift anyone else seems to want.
Oh well. Happy Holly days to you all anyway, even if you never see this tarnished salutation.
HOLLY DAYS 