The day after New Year’s Day, several neighbors tossed their dead Christmas trees in the ditch by the curb. The holidays are over, people are moving on, the world is returning (as much as it can) to its normal ebb and flow. The Yule log, as it were, has been doused, and so the long slog to spring begins.

I always dread this week. Especially that first 6:51am alarm on Monday morning. A few years ago, a travel company commissioned a somewhat shady psychologist to build a somewhat suspect algorithm for the saddest day of the year, and Dr. Cliff Arnall declared that day to be the third Monday in January, which came to be known as Blue Monday. The nod to the New Order song is a nice touch, but I’d argue until I’m blue in the face in favor of the first Monday after New Year’s. That’s the day most of humanity goes back to school and full-time work after a two-week break. In our household, where there’s a concerted group effort to make the holidays fun, festive and full of family time, it’s easily the saddest day of the year. Everything is harder the week after break — push-ups, emails, getting excited about salad — everything except sleeping and adding to one’s winter stores. I spent the past eight weeks pouring beer and cheese and sugar down my gullet, and now I feel like I’m writing my life with a dull pencil. Meanwhile, the chiseled Millennials on the back of my box of keto-friendly cereal are living their best lives, smiling under the sun as they jog in the sand toward the ocean, surfboards under their arms, while I sit here wondering how much longer I can last before taking a mid-morning nap.

This time of year it helps to have a sense of humor and a good sweater. Right before winter 2020 got underway, I bought a Clark Griswold cardigan. My sister had rented out a movie theater for a private family screening of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation to celebrate my brother-in-law’s birthday, and my wife, Erica, and I decided to dress the part and go as Ellen and Clark. I figured the cardigan would be a useful addition to the costume bin afterward, but it turned out to be one of the most functional pieces of clothing I’ve ever purchased and something like second skin for my first Ohio winter in 18 years. I started wearing it every day, hanging it on the bed post when I went to sleep at night and putting it back on when I got up in the morning. The cardigan goes with anything because I work from home and I say it goes with anything, dammit, and I wear it with the no-nonsense confidence of the women-on-the-go in those ’80s Sheer Energy pantyhose commercials. That, or a hopeless slob. At one point I got melted marshmallow on it and still didn’t put it in the wash for several days, because we were deep into winter and the season was heavy and sad and who the hell was going to see me anyway? This is what it sounds like when doves cry.

Even when you’re happy, winter is like a boat without an oar that drifts you farther away from joy, and during that long first season back in the Lake Erie snowbelt, I lost sight of the simple pleasures that brighten the dark days. There were some days I didn’t get up from my laptop to put on a record or step outside to breathe in the brisk, rejuvenating air. I got stuck in a rut, and it soon revealed itself to be the inevitable comedown from the prolonged adrenaline rush of our cross-country move in August 2020. The fall had provided a few sneak peeks. Two weeks after moving into our new home, feeling somewhat settled but only 40% of the way there, Erica and I both crashed, mentally and physically, and took a couple days to rest before revving up our engines again. Then pandemic fatigue hit Erica the day after Halloween and she nearly rented a car and drove to Florida to see her mom before deciding to stay put, reset and plan the trip for a safer time. But collectively, the comedown didn’t hit us all until winter came. It didn’t help that my father spent a night in the hospital after a stroke scare 15 days before Christmas. Or that we sent our 12-year-old into knee surgery on the morning of New Year’s Eve after a freak injury at the start of winter break. Or that we returned a rescue dog to the shelter only six weeks after adopting him as a family Christmas gift. These three gut-punches amounted to a TKO for our trio, and it was hard to pull ourselves up off the canvas. A weekend retreat to a remote cabin in the Appalachian foothills was a momentary reprieve, but it wore off quickly upon our return to reality. I can burrow into solitude like nobody’s business, but the first full pandemic winter was a serious test of my mettle and a surprising drain on my spirit. Even I can only take so much isolation, and as I attempted to use the time to start new projects and sort out what I was going to do with the rest of my life, I only felt rudderless. Most days I struggled to find an entry point to any endeavor, bouncing from one task to the next and ultimately abandoning most of them. This went on for weeks, and one Saturday night in early February, as I navigated the dead strip-mall world in Macedonia, Ohio, snowflakes falling in a slow waltz to the ground under the sickly yellow glow of artificial light, “How Soon is Now?” started playing in my head, Morrissey crooning about a club if you’d like to go, but I was miles from nowhere shuffling across a frozen parking lot, trying not to slip on the ice underneath my feet, and suddenly I missed everything. Most of all myself.

Mercifully, seasons change. The earth eventually tilts back in our favor. We are not tethered to perpetual gloom. As we worked our way out of winter 2021, I scraped the mucus off my brain by turning, as I often do, to music. I don’t know if going down an Alice In Chains rabbit hole for the first time in two decades or drip-feeding Concrete Blonde’s Bloodletting for a never-ending February is the best way to go, but that’s where I was at and it worked so I rolled with it. Still, it felt like a minor victory to get to March.

So far so good with winter 2022. For the second straight year, the city of Hudson encouraged residents to keep their holiday lights up through January – you know, to brighten the dark days and all that – and last year several households still had their lights on in February. Maybe it helped, maybe it didn’t. Sitting here in my Clark Griswold cardigan this first full week of January, I wonder how the rest of the winter will play out as we approach the second anniversary of the shutdown and another variant spreads like biblical fire. The story keeps going, and some days it feels like it’s going nowhere. Other days, I awake to a world that looks and feels like Before Times until I’m somehow reminded of the Thing – oh yeah, that.

I’ve always loved the hue of the sunlit sky this time of year. As unwelcoming as the season can be, I’m comforted by the soft, cool blue above my head and the promise of warmer spring days ahead. Earlier this week, as we took a family walk around the block, the late-afternoon sunlight blanketed a grove of trees down the street, and I shared my appreciation for the sun on the bare branches and the particular beauty of the daytime winter sky. Having spent most of the walk taking cheap phone pictures of the dead Christmas trees in the ditches to amuse ourselves, Magnolia stopped one last time to photograph the grove and frame the moment in time. And for a minute there, the weight of our heavy week lifted.

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