In Praise of the ‘January Blues’

The sight of discarded Christmas trees marks an end to the celebratory holiday season and a certain new year melancholy can set in. (Photo courtesy of Shutterstock)

The curbsides along the circle where I live are strewn with remnants of Christmas trees, lying on their sides like fallen soldiers, waiting for the trash collectors. Gone are the sparkling gold and multi-colored lights that shone through December’s long nights. We are headed toward the third Monday in January, which some researchers dub “Blue Monday.” They say it is possibly the saddest day of the year when we realize our holiday celebrations are over and what’s ahead is mostly work and cold.

But I am not here to bury January beneath a snow drift. I’m here to praise it.

First, a disclaimer. January is my birth month, so I am predisposed to like it. Still, I get why people despise January. It’s long. It’s a buffer between the first work day of the new year and the penitential season of Lent when we are supposed to own up to our shortcomings. Not much to cheer about there. The wife of a colleague of mine would become so distraught in January that he took to buying her a small gift for each of its 31 days.

Still, can there be any better remedy to clear the head than a brisk walk outside with a bracing January wind glancing your face?

What compares to the spare beauty of bare trees in winter? Strolling past each tree, gazing at its unique architecture, is like walking past artworks in a museum. Each day, between the empty branches I spot something that summer and autumn leaves had hidden. It might be a squirrel’s nest, a rooftop, a lit window in the distance.

Bare trees on the grounds of Weston Priory in Vermont reveal the unique architecture of each tree. To walk past them is like looking at artworks in a museum. (Photo by Pat Leyko Connelly)

Singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer recently posted a beautiful reflection in her newsletter, “The Gathering of Spirits.” Carrie describes hiking amid the scent of woodsmoke in a thick jacket, mittens and earflap hat beneath an “indigo blue ache” of sky.

“There is a tendency to want to fill up empty spaces, all that openness can feel at loose ends,” she writes. “I remind myself in January that what suspiciously looks and feels like a hole, may actually be a space, a space that has been waiting for me to peel away everything and ‘be’ there, to see what has been patiently ready for my full attention.”

It is wise counsel to appreciate those times that nudge us to “peel away everything” and ‘be’ there to discover what calls for our attention.

I realize a certain melancholy can set in when the holiday decorations are packed back into hibernation, as mine were this week. I always marvel at how decorations that took me days, sometimes weeks, to put up, can be returned to their resting places in just a few hours.

Melancholy can set in when the Christmas trees, decorations and Nativity scenes have to be packed away for another year’s hibernation. (Photo by Judith Valente)

This week, in a January ritual that will unfold across countless communities, workmen will take down their town’s municipal Christmas tree. Last year at this time, I watched for a mesmerizing hour as workers in blue overalls uprooted the community tree in the small town of Guardiagrele, where I live when I am in Italy.

One by one they dismembered the branches, cut up the trunk and placed its remnants on a truck bed. What lingered was a scent of pine — the memory of delight the tree had brought to all who saw it.

So let’s not think of this year’s Christmas trees as swept up and piled in some landfill. They really aren’t gone. They have turned into memories.

Here is the poem I wrote about Guardiagrele’s Christmas tree. And here’s to the empty spaces filled with new discoveries that this long month spreads before us — if we take the time to pause and look. A merry January to all!

A Scent of Pine

— Judith Valente

The usual gaggle of old men and pigeons

who flock together for morning chit-chat

had gathered in the piazza to watch workmen

in blue jump suits disrobe Guardiagrele’s Christmas tree.

First, they removed one by one the cloth ornaments

in the shape of diamonds and squares the ladies of the town crocheted.

Branch by branch, they dismembered the tree,

cut into pieces the towering trunk that had dominated il centro,

seemed it would always be there, unchanging, invincible.

With fulcrum and crowbars they dislodged the wooden poles

that had secured the pine in place, mesmerizing a toddler

who refused to budge even when his mother nudged him on,

even when a crane lifted the last chunk of trunk from the soil,

and it lay atop a truck-bed of branches like a fallen soldier’s torso.

Then the workers replaced the slab of pavement

they had removed weeks before to fix the tree in the ground,

a square that seemed more like a tombstone now

for the silent gift the tree had been.

With a broom made of twigs, they swept up fallen needles.

The scent of pine, like a woman’s perfume, lingered in the air.

The municipal tree in the main piazza in Guardiagrele, Italy before it was removed in the kind of annual January ritual that takes place across countless communities. (Photo by Judith Valente)