Christmas (just) past

And so another Christmas is gone.  I no longer feel the enthusiasm to take out our tree from storage and decorate it.  Luckily for me, my daughter & her daughter came over for a weekend (she lives 2 hrs drive away) and decorated the tree.

This time, for dinner on Christmas Day, my daughter and family and a nephew and niece were with us.  I cannot believe that I cooked a dinner, all by myself, me, for whom cooking is a depressing chore!  We had a chicken roast, a coca-cola pork pot roast, beans with bacon, a mushroom sauce, salad, garlic bread and icecream for dessert.  I think I'm writing this down just to remind myself, at some later date, that I actually did it.  Incidentally, except for the chicken, the recipes I got mostly through pinterest.  Thank you Pinterest!  Unfortunately nobody thought of taking any pictures.

Well now the end of 2015 is almost upon us.  I do hope that 2016 will be a more peaceful year than this one was.  Wishing everyone a peaceful and productive 2016.

Winter in Kerala

It is winter here 9.6°N of the equator.  The sun shines with almost as much heat as usual.  But the angle of the sunlight is different.  The quality of the light makes the air feel just a tad cooler, the bird calls sound wintry and as I look at the sky I feel a yearning, [as Hans Christian Andersen's ugly duckling must have felt when he saw the other swans flying south at the beginning of winter] a yearning to be a bird, flying high in the thinner air.  There is also a tug in my heart, a nostalgia for times gone by.  The light makes me aware that another year is on it's way out and a new one to come, hopefully more peaceful than this one was.
The shadows chase each other outside my window, but the shadows are fuzzy, not stark and the light gentle.
I love the December light.