What is December? — a poem

What is December?  

This December it’s often 70 degrees when it should be 35.

The bark and branches are brown and bare. 

Grass looks exhausted and husked. The sky cloudy and gray.

This December every end-of-the year list has been packaged sent and advertised across my feeds and inboxes; beggin me to browse and consume.

It’s a mad dash to clean, plan, cook, schedule — to hurry and get to the Big Relax: the couch, the binge, the quiet hours with novels and hobbies and items from these lists. The movies with loved ones, ice cream and chocolate covered pretzels, long walks without an appointment or concern. 

Every bit of the year feels crammed into this month. It doesn’t feel real or a part of the year, but more like a curved corner — a waiting room for 2025. 

It’s the top layer of this past year, but is at the bottom of our calendars. It feels slow, but rushed.

“It’s tense in here,” I hear a woman say in the post office. She wears a Santa hat. She has a purse with a discount sale tag still dangling from the strap, cheetah slippers and a slurpee. 

A man is shaking his cane at the lack of stamps, shuffling out the door. A mom of three — all three in the post office — says she just waited 45 mins only to hear bad news: she isn’t getting her mail  and the office doesn’t have it. 

The tall earnest and patient postal worker doesn’t know how to help them; he works this day alone. 

A bearded bar tender I recognize looks tired with baggy clothes and six packages and a shirt that says, “tales are best from the dead” with a skeleton cartoon, which, also, is wearing a Santa hat. 

The line is 14 people deep. It’s so warm outside the A/C blows through the vents; a 20-year-old jogs by the windows in nothing more than a sports bra and short shorts. 

We all want to be free.  We wish to tick this task off the list to reach the Big Relax. Be free of this line. 

We’ve all made the choice to do this job rather than the internet, some of us start to regret this as we tap our phones — holding back boredom that comes with the Big Wait. 

Slowly we push boxes across the linoleum floor as the line creeps forward. Some of us — I’m trying to be one of them — are trying to accept this line, this Big Wait. I try to realize that this is December. 

December is waiting. 

We all carry documents and artifacts of love and care that we wish to deliver. We all carry these packages of gifts. Packages with homemade cookies; with hand written notes; gifts bought out in the wild. 

We wait in this line because we love. 

We love the people who will get these packages. I think of my not-born-yet daughter, who now lives in her own package within the person I love most in this world. She, my daughter, will soon arrive after 3 years of waiting — our wait long and over. 

English professor Anna Kornbluh writes, “There is no life without forms, yet form has many lives.” We aren’t stuck in one place or form — a situation always changes.

The weather the next day will be in the 30s with snow flurries. December isn’t a lame duck or a dead branch. It’s a form that changes, too. 

It’s a time to write your messages of love — to wait and reflect — and be ready to be called and send your packages off. For those too, will take a new form in a new place.