Happy Yuletide

I believe I can honestly say that I have never looked forward to Yule this much in my life. I've always been rather intrigued by that dark part of the year in between Samhain and Yule -- Samhain is supposed to be the end of the year, after all, but none of the rebirth imagery starts until Yule, leaving the months of November and most of December a kind of cosmic no-man's land, which I usually adore -- but this year Samhain was just dark enough, and the intervening months just hard enough, that Yule was both a relief and a wonderful celebration. And, yesterday, finally, my scheduling changes went through at work and I've gotten enough time off to go home for the holidays. It was a near thing there, for a while.

I continue to be unable to find convenient community celebrations (until after the fact; apparently there was a bonfire down by the lake last night, which I didn't find out about until this morning), but my roommate and I had quite a wonderful impromptu celebration of our own, featuring a bottle of red wine, a gallon of wassail, and large amounts of freshly baked bread. And frozen pizza for dinner. Look, there's only so much effort I can reasonably make on a Thursday night.

And, impossibly, the weather has finally turned a reasonable degree of cold for Wisconsin in December -- starting today all that rain they predicted for the next week is turning to snow. Call me old-fashioned, but I love a white Christmas.

Hope everyone else's celebrations were wonderful, and enjoy the sun if you're getting it!