We stayed in and goofed around, which feels like an accomplishment when the world keeps hinting that productivity should involve pants and plans. Nintendo Switch gift codes became tiny digital treasure maps. Click redeem. Confirm. Wait. Download. Repeat. Cozy games slid into the console like new books onto a bedside stack. Games where nothing explodes unless it is a campfire and even then politely. Games that hum instead of shout. Little pixel worlds patiently waiting for us to arrive and do nothing of great importance.
This morning the gang broke the seal and went out for bagels from Donnie D’s. The day officially began sometime after that.
The rest of the hours were spent in that soft blur where time forgets to announce itself. Controllers passed back and forth. Screens glowed. We laughed at small things and generally chit-chatted. Outside continued without us and seemed fine about it.
There is talk of supper from Frank’s later. A hopeful maybe. One of those gentle promises you do not want to stare at too hard. If my luck holds, there will be comfort food and no dishes that require deep emotional commitment.
If not, that is fine too. Today already did what it needed to do. Stayed quiet. Stayed kind. Let us stay in.
Our friend showed up today, right as Yuletide was loosening its grip. One more bag by the door. One more coat finding a place to land. The house adjusted without comment, as if it had been expecting this all along.
We stayed in. Outside could wait. Roanoke settled into its quiet rhythm, the valley doing its own Boxing Day breathing. The mountains stayed put. The roads stayed light. None of it felt urgent enough to interrupt the inside of the house.
Conversation filled the spaces between things. Food appeared in low-effort ways. Someone laughed from the kitchen. Someone else wandered off to look out a window for a while. The day unfolded without instructions.
Boxes still leaned where they had been left. Wrapping paper kept pretending it might be useful again. A gift still needed batteries and still did not get them.
Boxing Day is good at this. Making room. Letting the noise fade without taking the warmth with it.
A friend here for a week or so. A quiet house learning a new shape.
Stocking- Candy! More candy Jr mints, York patties, oreos, butter cookies
Kevin Columbo late seasons Pearl toys
Chris and Larry Mothman, yeti, werewolf and Bigfoot toys Glow filament – blue Ti-83 plus graphing calculator Greenhouse top for 3d printer Pens Project battery Time for timer tshirt
Allison 3d printer Filament Desk Markers Alpaca pin Bigfoot stickers Sd card reader & card USB thumbdrive Snowflake stringer- ornaments Adabox 22 w/mini keyboard Crow t-shirts orange and purple Twisted cryptids and 2 expansions Killer Croc figure King Shark figure Govee floor lamp Bigfoot sippycup
A hooded figure in a sleigh, spreading red and green xmas magic
Christmas always shows up whether we are ready or not.
It slides in quietly some years, loudly in others, but it always arrives carrying the same question. What do we give, and what do we wish for the people around us.
This year feels like one of those long uphill winters. The kind where everyone seems a little more tired, a little more guarded, and a little more unsure of what comes next. And yet, here we are again. Lights in windows. Wrapping paper half torn. Coffee gone cold because someone stopped mid sip to laugh at something small.
I keep thinking about good people this season.
Not perfect people. Not loud people. Just good ones.
The ones who keep showing up even when no one is watching. The ones who help without posting about it. The ones who listen more than they speak. The ones who carry quiet burdens and still make room for others.
Those people deserve good things.
They deserve mornings that feel lighter. News that lands gently instead of hard. Unexpected kindness that finds them when they are not looking for it. They deserve rest without guilt and joy without explanation.
Christmas, at its best, reminds us that hope does not need to be complicated. Sometimes it looks like a simple sled ride across cold mountains. Sometimes it looks like color cutting through winter gray. Sometimes it is just the decision to wish well for someone else without needing anything back.
So this is my Christmas wish.
May good things find good people this year.
May effort be met with appreciation. May patience be rewarded with peace. May the kindness you put into the world circle back to you in ways you do not expect but deeply need.
If you are carrying a lot right now, I hope Christmas gives you permission to set it down for a moment. If you are celebrating, I hope it feels full and real and shared. And if you are somewhere in between, that strange quiet middle, I hope you know that counts too.
Christmas does not ask us to be perfect. It just asks us to be present.
Here is to warmth, to color in the cold, and to believing that good people still matter.
I still have yet to wrap presents that are going to be unwrapped tomorrow.
That sentence alone feels like a confession. Not a scandalous one, just the quiet kind you admit to yourself while staring at a roll of wrapping paper that has not moved in three days. The gifts are bought. They are hidden well enough. They are absolutely, undeniably not wrapped.
There is something oddly fitting about it. All season long we talk about preparation, planning, doing things ahead of time. Advent calendars count down the days. Lists get checked twice. Meanwhile, I am counting hours and telling myself there is still plenty of time, even though tomorrow is already leaning over my shoulder.
Wrapping presents has always felt less like a task and more like a moment. It requires stopping. Sitting down. Paying attention. Folding paper that never quite lines up and taping corners that pretend to cooperate. Maybe that is why it gets delayed. It demands presence, and presence is harder to schedule than a quick online order.
Tomorrow, the paper will be torn away in seconds. Tape will give up immediately. Bows will be tossed aside without a second thought. All that effort, gone in a flash. And yet, that fleeting moment is the point. The wrapping is not for efficiency. It is for anticipation.
So yes, the presents are still bare this morning. The scissors are still in the drawer. The tape is still on the shelf. But there is comfort in knowing that even last minute care still counts as care. Tomorrow will come whether the gifts are wrapped or not. I will get it done, probably later than planned, probably with crooked edges and too much tape.
And that is fine. Some traditions are perfectly imperfect, especially the ones finished just in time.
I have learned that I arrive places a little sideways.
Pisces on the front door. I don’t come in loud. I come in listening. Feeling the temperature of a room before I speak. Letting people project things onto me that I didn’t pack, and then gently setting them back down later. I’ve always known that solitude is not loneliness for me. It’s maintenance.
Money and value live in Aries. Which explains a lot. I need to feel like I earned my footing myself, even if it took longer or came in fits and starts. Independence isn’t a slogan. It’s a nervous system requirement. I don’t like being rushed, but I hate being boxed in more.
My words move like Taurus. Slow. Measured. I circle what I want to say before I say it. I repeat routes, phrases, ideas. Familiar roads matter. Familiar sounds matter. When I speak, it’s because I mean it, not because I need to fill the space.
Home has always been Gemini. Conversation. Books. Radios on in the background. Multiple threads running at once. Even silence feels like it’s thinking about something. Roots weren’t a single thing, but a handful of overlapping voices, all shaping how I learned to listen inward.
Joy lives in Cancer. Which means creativity comes from memory. From protecting small things. From holding something fragile and saying, this matters. I make things the way you make a meal for someone you love. Carefully. Personally. Sometimes quietly, hoping it lands.
Work needs Leo heat. I have to care. I have to feel some pride in what I do, or my energy goes dim. Recognition isn’t about applause, it’s about being seen as myself, not a stand-in. When daily life has a spark, I thrive. When it doesn’t, I feel it in my bones.
Partnerships are Virgo territory. I notice everything. I try to be useful. I’m better at showing up than sweeping gestures. I love through attention. The lesson, over and over, is learning when to stop fixing and let things breathe.
The deep stuff wears Libra. Even in transformation, I want balance. Even in endings, I want fairness. Shared resources, shared pain, shared healing, all of it wants conversation, not conquest. I believe in meeting darkness without tipping the scales.
Meaning is Scorpio. No shortcuts. No surface answers. I want the real thing, even if it costs something. Beliefs aren’t decorative. They’re forged. I’ve always been drawn to what’s hidden, not because it’s dark, but because it’s honest.
Public life stretches toward Sagittarius. Teaching without preaching. Pointing toward the horizon. I’m at my best when I’m allowed to be curious out loud, to say, look at this, isn’t it strange and beautiful. Legacy feels less like status and more like leaving a trail someone else might follow.
Friends and futures sit in Capricorn. I don’t collect people. I commit to them. Community is built, not stumbled into. Long-term plans matter. So does showing up, year after year, even when it’s quiet.
And underneath it all, Aquarius hums in the twelfth house. The private mind. The late-night thoughts. The sense that I’m tuned into something wider than myself, even when I don’t have words for it yet. Solitude brings ideas. Stillness brings clarity. Change starts quietly here.
When I look at the whole thing together, it feels less like fate and more like weather. A pattern of noticing. Of staying. Of watching the world carefully and responding with care.
I was born under an arrangement of lights that prefers the edges of rooms.
This morning I learned again that the Sun is tucked away in Aquarius, behind the curtain, in the twelfth house where things murmur instead of announce themselves. That feels right. I have never been good at standing in the center. I have always preferred the side wall, where the paint bubbles slightly and the clock ticks louder than it should.
The Moon, sits in Taurus and spends its time in the third house, counting ordinary things. This explains the comfort I take in small, repeatable observations. The same birds returning to the feeder. The same patch of damp ground that never quite dries. Words written daily, not because anything happened, but because the day itself did.
Pisces rises. That, too, makes sense. People often look at me as if I am already halfway into a dream they had once but cannot remember clearly. Venus apparently lives there as well, softening the edges, lending an kind of accidental kindness to my manner. I have noticed animals trust me quickly. People sometimes do too, and then say more than they meant to.
Mars and Neptune are together somewhere deep and dark, in Scorpio, peering into the long corridors of belief and hidden history. This explains my habit of lifting old stones, not to move them, but just to see what has been living underneath. I rarely bring anything back. Knowing is usually enough.
There is a quiet seriousness in the chart about value and survival, a Saturn lesson that unfolds slowly. I have felt that lesson all my life, like learning how to carry something fragile without being told what it is.
None of this feels predictive. It feels archival. Like discovering a weather report from the day you were born and realizing it never really stopped.
Outside, the light is thin and wintery. The ground holds yesterday’s cold. Somewhere nearby, something small is leaving tracks I won’t see until later, if at all. I write this down anyway.
For me, December 23 is not a holiday. That is its power. It is the day of almosts. Almost Christmas. Almost rest. Almost reflection. The day when the world is still required to function, but everyone’s attention has drifted elsewhere. You can feel it in the post office line, in the way clerks wish you a good one without specifying what “one” is. You can feel it in the animals. The squirrels have shifted from frantic to deliberate. The birds linger longer at the feeder, less nervous, as if they know something is about to change. By evening, the temperature drops quickly. Porch lights flick on one by one across the neighborhood like a slow constellation. Somewhere up the hill, someone practices a trumpet, the sound thin and uncertain in the cold air. Somewhere else, a dog barks once and then stops, satisfied. The sky settles into that particular Roanoke gray-blue that never fully darkens, reflecting city light back down into the valley. Today asks very little. Just to notice where you are. To recognize the shape of the place holding you. To acknowledge the quiet before the noise resumes. Tonight, Roanoke is steady. The mountains remain. The creek keeps moving. Tomorrow will bring its own weight. For now, this day is enough.
The winter solstice arrived quietly this year, as it usually does around here. Blue peaks rose like folded blankets against the sky, layered and patient, the same way winter has stacked itself on this place in years past. The day tucked itself inward, becoming small and careful. Even at noon the light felt borrowed, a pocket-sized sun smiling from just above the ridgeline, its rays loose and playful, mostly at rest on the mountains.
I have written before about this day, about how it never announces itself with certainty, only with a sense of having reached the bottom of something. The solstice does not knock. It simply finds you already inside the longest night, sitting quietly, waiting for you to notice.
For now, the sun does not blaze or command. It grins. Its wandering lines spill outward like hair or roots or thoughts, reaching over the mountains and into the forest without urgency. This feels right for the solstice. The sun is still here, even on its shortest day, but it is relaxed about it. It knows the schedule. It knows it will be back. It always is.
Below, the trees gather in dark silhouettes, firs and pines standing shoulder to shoulder. Some are nearly black, some softened into green, all of them anchored. They look like they are listening. Forests always seem to understand timing better than people. I have trusted them before on days like this, and they have never been wrong.
Winter always feels like a negotiation between patience and faith. The mountains wear streaks of white like remembered snowpaths, evidence of where water and time have traveled before. I recognize these shapes. I have followed them through other winters, other solstices, when the cold pressed in and the light felt thin but persistent.
We light candles not because they conquer the night, but because they echo that smiling sun: a small, friendly presence saying, “I am still here.” This site has accumulated a fair number of these small lights over the years. Notes made in the dark. Observations written low and slow. They add up.
This is the hinge of the year, drawn simply but honestly. From here on, the light begins its slow return, not in leaps but in increments so small you have to trust they are happening. Tomorrow will be longer by a breath, by the width of a pine needle, by one more playful line added to the sun’s reach. That has always been enough.
The old stories knew this moment mattered. They built fires, told tales, sang songs that looped and curved the way those sunrays do, circling around the same idea. The dark is not an ending. It is a holding pattern. Against it, even a simple smile shines.
So tonight I greet the solstice the way I have before, and likely will again: quietly, attentively, grateful for the pause. The night can have its full say. The sun is already practicing its return, smiling above the forest.
Happy winter solstice.
May your mountains remain steady, your forests attentive, and your light return slowly, surely, and on its own time.
The wall seam has become a kind of highway. In the daylight footage the squirrel appears, efficient and twitch-bright, stopping every few inches as if the siding itself is speaking to him. Tail flicking, body taut, he treats the wall like a problem that can be solved with speed.
After dark, it is Capital V.
I am fairly sure now that the shape moving along the seam at night is him, running the vertical crack with that deliberate confidence skunks carry. No rush. No apology. The black and white pattern slides past the camera like a warning label come to life.
Same route. Same camera. Different hours, different rules.
They never meet. The squirrel believes in escape. Capital V believes in certainty. The wall holds both beliefs without comment. A seam in the house, a seam in the day, quietly in use.
It makes the backyard feel layered, as if daylight and darkness take turns inhabiting it, sharing the infrastructure but not the philosophy. I only learn about it later, from the footage, when the house tells me what it has been hosting.
There is a story that lives along the bends of the old creek, the one that looks shallow until you step in it and vanish to the knee. People here do not tell it outright. They gesture instead. A pause in conversation. A glance toward the waterline when the fog comes down early and wrong.
They say there was once a path that crossed the creek where the stones were set just so, like a sentence someone meant to finish later. At dusk, if you followed that line of rocks, you could hear your own name spoken softly from downstream. Not shouted. Not sung. Just stated, as if it were being checked off a list.
The elders, the quiet ones, say it was never a ghost. Ghosts want to be remembered. This thing wanted only acknowledgment. Step onto the stones, look down, and you would see the creek reflecting not the sky but another season entirely. Late summer light. Cicadas. The promise of warmth you had already used up.
One man supposedly crossed halfway and stopped. He came back older by several years, hair gone gray in a way that did not match his face. He refused to explain, only saying that the water had shown him a version of his life that kept going without him, and it seemed to be doing just fine.
These days the stones are scattered. Or maybe they only show themselves when they feel like it. The creek freezes in winter, but not all at once. There is always a moving seam, a dark V cutting through the ice, like the water is breathing under glass.
This morning there was frost on the grass and the sky had that pale, rinsed look it gets before snow that never quite arrives. I stood on the bank and listened. No voice. Just the creek doing what it does best, pretending to be ordinary.
Still, I did not step in. Some paths are not lost. They are simply waiting for the right name to be spoken back.
