The Glummery
(Sung in the voice of Tiny Tim to the tune of "Christmas Is Coming")
Christmas is over,
The goose has gotten fat.
We've all put our pennies
In the old man's hat.
Now decorations come down,
And the city looks denuded.
Nothing to anticipate:
To bed! we have concluded.
Now the depression settles in, all cozy in its slippers and long fleece robe, all curled up inside our heads, softly snoring and fogging our outlook until May.
Remember Christmas? That distant, decorated memory? The red ribbons and crooning carols? The city sidewalks -- busy sidewalks? All the holly-jolly and ho-ho-ho?
Ha. Ha. Ha.
All those twinkles (in the manicured trees near Chinatown) and glitter (on the hanging snowflakes of Penn Quarter) and the elegant strings of white lights (outside the Convention Center) -- they're a useless placebo against the pending migraine of winter.
The official start of winter may have happened days ago, on Dec. 21. But Winter begins now, when there's nothing left to look forward to and nothing left to look at. One final blessing on this side of the holiday divide is: At least there's not much daylight for looking.
But that's a slim silver shard, one of the few fragments of sparkling cheer not yet boxed and returned to its storage bin. In the wake of disappearing holly sprigs, wreaths and bright chipper bows, we confront, finally, Winter -- cranky, undernourished, white-bearded Winter, in all its barren, unadorned melancholy.
(And do not think this white-bearded Old Man Winter has made way for the ruddy-cheeked New Year's Baby -- that's just another distraction meant to disguise what's really going on in the first grim months of the calendar: the dim mornings, the black afternoons, the gloomy middays. There's nary a twinkle, nor a jingling bell, and even if the skies are clear, the cold sun breaches Washington's downtown canyons for a mere couple of hours. By 2 p.m., the sidewalks have descended into chilly shadows again.)
And that's exactly the problem with Christmas and, really, the final four months of the year: They are a cruel seduction, a groovy light-and-gem show meant to distract and disarm us. Think of the achingly bright, blue-denim skies of September, the rich topaz and gold of October, the luscious ruby reds of November, and -- the coup de grace, the grand finale -- the emerald green and heel-kicking scarlets of December. It's all a long spectacle of misdirection, a trick designed to blast from our heads the dread of the funeral about to descend.
Because, yes -- that is winter: a long, sullen funeral, brought to you by the Calvinists, without the lily-scented glories of FTD.
And do not pretend that, because the winter solstice is now behind us, we can bask in the oldest of hollow comforts: The days are getting longer! Ahem. At some point, yes, the span from sunup to sundown will stretch into something resembling an actual day -- instead of these truncated blips of day light that we now endure. But telling us that "the days are getting longer" is like telling a seventh-grade boy who is shorter than every girl in his class, "You'll grow!"
This helps nothing until the growth spurt actually occurs. Which is where we stand now -- stuck in seventh grade at the gym, in the seasonal equivalent of an endless middle-school dance, our collective nose cradled in the armpit of the girl who said yes when we finally got up the courage to ask.
The only thing to do is wait it out. January's murk will, at some point, leach into leaden February, with its holidays of false hope: Groundhog Day -- whose hallowed rodent promises, even in the brightest of years, a respite that's at least (!) six weeks away -- and Valentine's Day (need we say more?). When March blasts into view, it's generally icy and always shrill, and we must still endure April, the cruelest month, because no matter how many flowers it germinates, we are still nowhere near to being sun-soaked, and the ground beneath our feet has turned sodden and goopy.
Hark. The herald angels sang. Then they stopped. And we were left to fend for ourselves.