Surviving December With A Calendar Full of Jam

The thing distracting me from globally bad news is, unfortunately, a little daily treat.

The days are getting shorter. The wind has been bitterly cold for much of the past week. For three days in a row, I looked outside and it was lightly flurrying. The news has always been bad, but it feels exquisitely, especially bad recently. We watch our country make regressive reproductive health decisions and stupid public health decisions about closing its borders before discovering that the newest COVID-19 variant had, of course, already made its way to the United States weeks ago. It is hard not to feel like crawling into a hole in December.

So in light of all things bad, I have been looking for light where I can find it. Sometimes this means waking up at the ugly crack of dawn and willing myself to move my body at the gym, and other times it means doing some baking. Last year during the Christmas season when things seemed more bleak in a different way I delighted in the 25-day digital Nordic advent calendar from British illustrator Jacquie Lawson my friend Kate buys me every year. There are flash games (yes, in the year of our lord 2021) to play and ornaments to collect for your digital Christmas tree, but one could also simply open up the game and keep it as background noise, listening to the Christmas music it plays and sitting in one’s little fake living room with the roaring fire and the tree that becomes more decorated with every passing day of the…