Winter Edges In

It is not yet winter. But I can feel its fingers wrapping around the city, preparing to overtake it. The air outside smells like a box of hats and scarves.

Every year when the weather turned cold my mother would pull the box of winter wear from the back of the closet and it always smelled the same. A mix of old dryer sheets and crumbled leaves, and the dust that settled from the wood stove. Unknowingly, this smell has become a tell-tale sign of winter for me. And maybe for everyone else in the city because I think they all pulled out their dusty coats on the same day and filled the air with the smell of the coming winter.

Most of the leaves have left the tree branches and been swallowed up by the street sweepers. (The street sweepers which are responsible for my first Chicago ticket because they failed to have the signs up in time for me to move my car! But this post is supposed to be calm and contemplative...so I'll save the ticket rant for another day.)

Snowflake decorations are up on the streetlights, candy canes in the neighbor's garden, Christmas music at the grocery store... And I'm trying to roll with the punches. I am generally an avid believer that Christmas does not exist until after Thanksgiving. But as I sit here sipping my eggnog latte (that I got for half price due to a holiday sale) I am starting to soften to the idea of Thanksgiving and Christmas going hand-in-hand. After all, it is "the holiday season." And yesterday I realized that we only have a month to get through the list of 30 Christmas movies--and yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie--so we are going to have to get started!

But I am still reluctant to pack away my pumpkins and autumn leaves. It feels like admitting defeat. Admitting that soon my beautiful crunchy leaves will be rotting under a frigid blanket of ice and snow. Maybe I'll just put Santa hats on the scarecrows and lobby for a holiday merger...