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I had meant to write several different things this evening, about the news or about movies or about books recently read, but first I was at the doctor's and then I was in used book stores and then I was helping my parents decorate the tree, which this year is shorter than usual but self-confident with ornaments, and then I was asleep on the couch. Increasingly it feels strange to me to celebrate Christmas at all, but then it feels more important for all the reasons I noted two years ago: it's one thing to leave a tradition on my own terms, it's another to be made to drop it. When we were small, my mother named me and my brother both-ways children. I hold to my liminal spaces.

This collection of Christmas declarations from the 1935 Barnard Bulletin keeps coming around, but it's just that relatable. I wonder if it's too late to call "vegetate."