Every year on Christmas Eve I look for a way to express love.  For years I felt, as the non-religious sort, the true import of this holiday was a bit lost on me, but continued celebrating in my own way.

domesticat.net now chronicles fully a quarter of my existence on this earth, and combining that with a search function often serves to bring the arc of my life into clearer, simpler focus.

Other people focus solely on Christmas, but the entries of the past eight years tell me that this period of the year, this time of shortened days and year-end celebrations, matters as much to me as that one single day matters to most of you reading this entry.  I am not celebrating a religious event, but I am using the excuse of darkened, chilly days to re-evaluate my place in this life and the people I share it with.

I light words against the darkness, and leave them for you to find.  Here are two images from Christmas Eves come and gone:

My smile blossomed at ten after four, when he walked in the door, unexpected, early.  I had commented to Adam online a bit earlier that there was something calm and perfect about the afternoon: the raging storm; the slanted lamplight across my laptop; the soft sound of snoring, geriatric cats.  Suddenly, it was better.

Jeff smiled as he put his bag down and said, "Stacy sent us all home."  He put down his string bag of water bottle, lunch remnants, and snacks; he took his place on the other couch and I paused from debugging.

"I don't know what it is I want tonight," I said, "but I want to do something a little different.  I just don't know what."

"Why don't we go out to dinner?"

As close as you'll get to a Christmas card from us this year:

['Blessing enough' on flickr. ]
[Original photo shot in St. Patrick's, included in my 10/2007 New York City set.]

I board a plane for the Beer and Cheese Tour of Seattle at six a.m. next Thursday.

(Have you guys noticed over the past few years that every trip, project, etc. always seems to get a title after it's been in my life a while? By naming it, I bring it into existence. Or something.)

Slip out at the end of the day, purse strap over shoulder and CDs in hand, and look east; the hills, visible over Huntsville's skyline, are darkening fast. Look west, toward my commute, and the sun might've hung around for one last metaphorical cup of coffee but is more than likely on its way to say hello to the next time zone over.

[For Christmas 2008 I have temporarily moved this entry from December 2005 back to the front page of domesticat.net.]

I was asked recently about my Christmas traditions. Most of mine are secular, because this is very much a secular holiday for me, but one in which my cynicism is generally set aside in favor of care. The deceptive simplicity of Joni Mitchell sits side-by-side with the gospel exuberance of Earth Wind & Fire, and I sit at my computer late at night, sipping warm drinks and composing the most ghastly and maudlin of letters. Half of them, thankfully, I never send; the other half, thankfully, I do.

It's been one of those months, in which you start tending to long-overdue tasks just because it's easier than listening to the emptiness of the house. Not that I minded … entirely; I'm notorious for liking large dollops of privacy with sprinkles on top, but this has been a bit much, even for me.I've called it the San Francisco Project, just because I don't know its real name. It's the one that sent Jeff out to—one guess—for three weeks, and promises to possibly send him out there again come February or so. It's meant not too many dinners together, unless you count my dropping off soups and the like for Jeff at his lab, and so last night was unusual.

We have our little traditions, Friday night dinner being one of them; we go out to a restaurant we like, settle in, chow down, and talk. Not purposefully, because if it were that way, we'd be doing it wrong. Just catching up.

I give up. I've been lectured one too many times. While I don't do many gift exchanges with friends at Christmastime, there are a few friends with whom gifting does occur, and I keep hearing through the grapevine that I am The Impossible Friend to buy for.

When I was a teenager, I would stay up late on Christmas Eve, an ear on the quiet in the house and a mug of hot chocolate in my hand, watching whatever TV specials were available. Christmas Day was for family, but Christmas Eve was mine alone, a day of peace and quiet and reading.

Christmas Eve is a jazz day for me, the day that I dig out my Cassandra Wilson and Diana Krall and soak myself in the quieter side of life. Christmas Day is for family and yelling and presents and food and laughter; Christmas Eve belongs to me.