Russell Wangersky says crank up your compassion.

Uncommon Christmas season just around the corner

Two-thirty in the afternoon, and the day is already clearly tired of making daylight.

The sun is but a few fingers above the horizon, and the Christmas lights already show bright against their static house-front backdrops.

I mean, we are close, so tantalizingly close, to the days starting to get longer, but I can’t think of a year that the sheer shortness of days felt like it was having such an impact.

Get up in the grey half- light of morning, before the sun’s even clear of the horizon, and have that same sun vanish before you’re even finished with the workday — walk in the encompassing night like a neighbourhood watchman, past the curtained and uncurtained living rooms, the houses with blinds drawn and half-open, the cars idling at curbs, occupants deep in discussions, the parking lights bright like the cars are paying attention to the street, even if the drivers are not.

This has the feel of a hard year for many, and I do not doubt that it will show up in a host of later-arriving statistics that have no apparent connection to COVID19, but also everything to do with COVID-19.

That people will be lonelier, more on edge, less able to concentrate, sicker but also less likely to seek out help. There have been plenty of cautions about the increase in mental health concerns — it may be implied, but rarely directly pointed out, that the increase may turn up inside your house.

That’s not the only thing that’s coming.

Just as there is always a rush of deaths after the holidays — as if people had committed to themselves to hold on through the year, but meeting January, find that strength exhausted. There will be even more of that after this hard year ends, and the next, also hard, year begins.

Now, that sounds harsh and unfeeling, and in a way, it is meant to be exactly that; it’s meant to prick your conscience.

The sky may be giving up early on the day, but we don’t have to take its advice to go to bed early and pull the covers to our chins. ( Unless, of course, you want to; I think this year should be the year of succumbing to small, safe pleasures, from dark chocolate to walking in crisp, cold air.)

It’s going to be an uncommon Christmas season. For many, it will be smaller, we’ll be among fewer, it will be less ornate and, for the lonely among us, probably more difficult than the holidays usually are.

Christmas parties are hardly recommended — in fact, they are being actively discouraged for pandemic reasons — and for some among us, being on the outer edges of the Christmas party orbit is the closest the holiday will come to hitting home.

We’re not supposed to be bringing strangers to holiday dinner, not supposed to have parties blazing light and sound out across night-blue snow, not supposed to make merry in sheer defiance of the darkness.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do. There are simple, easy things that, while they won’t beat back the gloom, will at least serve to soften the sharp edges.

Think of it as if it were the treble and bass knobs on an oldstyle amplifier.

Crank up your compassion. Wind back your bile.

Remember that, even if you feel cheated by this hard year, there are plenty of people who have been cheated of far more.

There’s precious few hours of light outside right now.

Maybe, just maybe, try to find and share a little of that light from inside.