I love January. I know it’s cold and dark and most people are miserable, but I’m not. I like the excuse to stay in, huddle under a 
blanket, and make soup. This is probably the month when I like homeschooling the most, because while the rest of the world is outside waiting for buses and warming up the car, we’re still inside sipping hot drinks by the space heater.
Other months are showy, demanding us to celebrate holidays, decorate loudly, and fill our calendars. January is quiet, slowly allowing the light to grow longer and easing the daffodils up from their sleep. January coos to us, “Free up some space now. Slow down a bit. You need to rest.” If we are wise, we oblige.
January is full of hope. She hands us a clean calendar and encourages us to dream. She reminds us that we are mortal, hemmed in by hours, days, and weeks, and light and dark. Still, she urges us to rise above and make this year something unique and wonderful.
January is the clearing-out time. Christmas comes with all its joyful trappings and threatens to take over the place; January is our sister in solidarity saying, “here you may come, and no further.” We overwhelm donation centers with those things we thought we needed until just now.
January is kind to us in making us reevaluate. The loud voices in our heads tell us to achieve more! Do more! Go further! January quietly suggests that it might be better to do well at those things we’ve already undertaken — for the glory of God and not ourselves, for the benefit of others.
We’ll be distracted soon enough by other months. Hail, January. I love you. Do your good work while you’re here.
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“Other months are showy, demanding us to celebrate holidays, decorate loudly, and fill our calendars. January is quiet…”
I love the way you articulated it this way, Kelly. I think, for me, that’s always been the tension of January – there’s seemingly NOTHING going on. Add that to the interminable waiting those of us in the cold north experience in anticipation of spring, it can be a bleak month indeed. But, as you say, in these times of silence, like January, growth is still occurring, and the opportunity for hearing is still there. I just need to be quiet and pay attention.
You certainly have my sympathy, Glenn, enduring those long dark days in the Northeast! I remember them well. But last week I spoke to a friend about how heavy snow changes a community, and I realized I really missed the occasional snowbound day. I love the forced inactivity. And the quiet. There is no quiet like a snowstorm (that’s a teaser for the poem I picked for this month).
I love January, too. I like putting all the Christmas stuff away and seeing again how the house usually looks. I like setting goals. No, I LOVE setting goals. But in January it feels like you can focus on one or two of them while you take some extra naps and drink more hot chocolate than is truly advisable. This is all beautifully put, Kelly. Hail, January!
Hail, naps and hot chocolate!
Hail, January, indeed!
Hail, hail! But hopefully none falling from the sky.
What a lovely perspective! I always feel like I should shake off the holiday indulgences and attack the new year: new leaf, resolutions, shape up and clean out everything, etc. This idea of entering the new year gently and with God’s greatest command guiding my intentions is so much more appealing.
Maybe this is true for you — I get excited to do all those things, also, but I’m coming down off an adrenaline high from December so it’s easy to get discouraged and exhausted!