It’s hard to believe the rest of the year has flown by so quickly! I swear just yesterday I was running around in summer clothes and wishing for five minutes of winter weather — oh, wait, that actually WAS yesterday! Just to continue this year’s weird weather patterns, we’ve been averaging about eighty degrees for the past week. Combine that with the constant loop of songs like “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” which I’m treated to every time I enter a public place, and it makes for a slightly warped Christmas season. Thankfully, last night and this morning we seem to be getting back to some kind of normal December.

Still, I can’t help enjoying this time of year. Not the commercial, rude, tacky side that seems unavoidable these days, but the season itself. If I lived anywhere else, I don’t know if I would feel it the same way, but here in our little valley, there’s something enchanted about the winter.

I never really liked grey. When I was little, a grey sky meant a day inside, which was the worst sort of punishment I knew. Grey was the color you got when you mixed all of the paints together. In theory, at least. In my art classes, the paints were cheap and combined to a muddy brown. But still.

Now, though, I look forward to the time when the leaves are gone and the woods surrounding us are silvery-grey under a steel-grey sky. I love to let my imagination go and catch glimpses of grey-cloaked figures slipping between the trees. Sometimes they seem so real that I could swear it’s not my imagination at all. They might be men, elves, or wraiths — all I know is, they never appear until the world turns grey.

Now that I’ve probably convinced you all that I’m certifiable…

Anyway, it’s nice to be back.