“Do not go gentle into that good night,” Dylan Thomas wrote in the famous villanelle for his dying father. But I think it also applies to this time of year, when all the glistening, twinkling things that help us celebrate the holidays must finally be put away. Why?  I don’t know about you, but the pine cones and hemlock boughs and small white Christmas tree lights that I arrange every year on the top of my book cases make me happy.

The north wind blows.  Taxes are due. That second helping of Potatoes Anna has come home to roost around my middle.   All the more reason to try to hold onto some of the magic of the holidays. I think we need comfort and joy in lean, cold, workaday January much more than during the boisterous festivities of December. So I’m not letting go.  I’m not going gentle. I’m defying the calendar and some nagging sense of propriety and leaving my stuff up this year.  I plan to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”