Once a year, sometime in November, the WARM 101.3 radio station in changes from top 40 pop music and soft rock to what is essentially just Mariah Carey’s ~ All I Want For Chrismas ~ repeating on a never-ending loop. This year, I have been turning the radio dial past that station every time I’m driving and listening and looking for a song.

We watched White Christmas. My sister is listening to an audio recording of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I haven’t taken the time to listen to John Denver & the Muppets CD.

I cut down a tree, for the house. It’s covered in colorful lights and familiar ornaments. I think I owe the universe about 22 trees, so far. None of this stuff about paying someone else to plant a tree halfway across the world. I need to plant them myself, somewhere I can go back and visit.

The sun’s hanging low in the south for what seems like just a handful of hours at a time. The nights start out early and drag themselves out for as long as possible. I know that there are still and quiet places, hidden under the shelter of the pine trees. There are impossibly dark, cold corners behind dumpsters in the back allys of the villiage where it’s possible to look up and see Orion’s belt.

I could sit here and write about the feeling of not feeling the way I’m supposed to feel around Christmas. But I’m sort of rejecting the notion that there is a way that I ought to be feeling at this time of year, I think. I’ve decided to let that one go.

From 10,000 feet up, I would rather enjoy the time that I’m living through now than feel sad because I’m not feeling the childhood magic that there used to be.

It comes down to perspective.

“Every so often, I look down at the blue veins on the inside of my wrist and remember they’re blue because of a molecule called hemoglobin which is responsible for carrying oxygen to my cells, and that hemoglobin contains trace amounts of iron, and iron can only be forged in the heart of a star that is dying. And so those blue lines on my wrist are literally full of stardust, which became part of the earth when it formed 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years ago, and traveling at the speed of light, which is as fast as it is possible to travel, it would take 81,000 years to get to the nearest star aside from the sun, and that is only the beginning. This makes all of the problems on the surface of this exceptional little planet seem smaller, somehow, and perhaps more important for all of their smallness – because of all the possible lives I could have lived, I ended up living this one. Might as well make the most of it while I’m here.”

[This is an excerpt from a paper that I just wrote for a class about Ethics, which I am going to miss.

*For the sake of acememic integrity, I feel like I need to point out that the stardust-in-our-veins concept was shamelessly stolen from a post that I found on tumblr a couple of years ago. I have a friend who gets cranky about misattributed quotes and I can’t stop hearing his voice in my head telling me to get out of bed and go downstairs and fix this, so – here. Have a paper trail. Love you.