Is there a word for the tiny balls of icy-snow that form when the temperature hovers around freezing? Whatever it is, it’s blowing down from the colourless sky right now and accumulating on rooftops and pavement. Almost Christmas. Just past the darkest day of the year.

This season, I’ve noticed the lights. People put up lights every season, of course, but this is the first season that I’ve paused in real appreciation to celebrate and enjoy the beauty and poignance of this collective effort — to light the early evenings and dark long nights. I’ve paused to admire blue icicle lights blinking on an apartment balcony, and whole houses lit up with tumbling disco colours projected upward from a source planted in the ground. I’m especially fond of a giant snowman tethered in a friend’s front yard, dancing with all colours of the pastel rainbow. It’s fair to say the lights have brought me great joy.

This is a difficult time of year. It’s a difficult time to be alone, or sick, or scared, to be estranged from or apart from or without or lacking, to be hungry or cold or lost, to be in need. Absences are starker.

But light also happens.

It’s like collectively we’re signalling to each other — that we know it’s dark out here, and this may be inadequate, but we’d like to offer up a bush wrapped in garish luminescence.

Like the giant snowman tethered in my friend’s front yard, light also signals lightness, ease, relaxation, being silly, goofy, making each other laugh. All of this I wish for you. Because life isn’t an either/or construction; we can grieve in the same moment that we’re peeing our pants with laughter. And in truth, we know this all the more profoundly during this season — that light needs the dark to be seen, to truly shine and sparkle and glitter.

xo, Carrie