Oh, January, January, why are you in such a hurry to prove you are in charge? The New Year began with such lovely, mild weather, but these past three days of waking up to temperatures in the twenties have been anything but a subtle introduction to winter.
Gently, my dear cozy month, gently.
It is hard to go anywhere when it is this cold, and it's just pointless to fight it. And so I think we will begin our snuggly, cozy month right now. Piles of afghans and soft throw blankets are scattered about the living room, and books are stacking up on every surface. It is, after all, impractical to spend the afternoon climbing trees in this weather.
Cozy corners, for all of us, are in order during a month such as this, I think.
Even Princess Hazelnut has a reading area tucked away in the living room, filled to the brim with thrifted, perfectly sized furniture and secondhand well-loved children's books. And while she can't actually read yet, she doesn't see why that silly fact should prevent her from snuggling up with a book the way the rest of the family does.
This will be a good month for it, I believe. For lots of reading. The Boy Wonder is waiting on the eighth book in the How to Train Your Dragon series to come in at the library, and has, in the meantime, dived headfirst into the first book of The Guardians of Ga'Hoole.
Princess Hazelnut has memorized Kitty's New Doll, so she opens it and reads it out loud two or fifteen times a day, doing her level best to emulate her big brother, asking for definitions of words she pretends not to know.
The Carnivore's end table is groaning under a tower of books on religion and politics - currently there are bookmarks in Francis Chan's Erasing Hell and Mark Rutland's Launch Out Into the Deep.
I am in the middle of Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin, though I seem to have set it briefly aside while I savor every single wickedly funny moment of Stephen King's On Writing.
Yes, indeed. This is the cozy month.
Mugs of steaming hot coffee or tea, bouillon, or hot water with lemon. Creamy oatmeal for breakfast. Soups and casseroles for dinner. And every reason to spend all the moments we can here, at home.
2 comments:
It's funny, I would never have thought of January as the cozy month. In Kansas I generally think of it as hell month - if I can get through it, we just have to make it through Feb and then March is spring, thank God. October or November are cozy months up here.
It's all a matter of perspective (and geography, of course). January used to be a month that I viewed negatively because of the cold, but now it seems to me that if I embrace the cold, and the necessary time spent in the warmth of our home, then it can be quite cozy and lovely.
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