With this Sunday we leave the Christmas Season and enter into a New Year. We all go through a peculiar sadness as we put up the ornaments, eat up the leftovers, and silence the sounds. Perhaps we have already put away the openness and ready affection that marked us during these weeks. If the house looks bleak and sterile, maybe we do a bit ourselves. We are in the process of shaking our heads and getting back to regular living as we meet the year ahead.

How nice it would be if we could take some of the bits and pieces of Christmas, tuck them into the nooks and crannies of everyday life, and take them into the new year with us. It would be almost like making a New Year’s resolution and keeping it.

We know how things go: bills and burdens; costs and catastrophes; days and dallyings; trials…