Happy (Belated) Candlemas

 

Candle in a windowsill in a turf house museum in NW Iceland

When Candlemas weekend came around I had requested the day off, but with 5 feet of snow and numerous hours of shoveling, we were both too pooped out to properly celebrate. Another weekend came and went, then I decided that we would try again 10 days after the fact because this holiday is still important to us and I think we were both missing it a little bit.

You might be wondering at this point what Candlemas is. Instead of going all encyclopedia on you, I’m going to instead tell you what Candlemas is to me, because it’s not a holiday I grew up with. Rather, it’s a holiday that I learned about when I was setting up my first-ever adult household (not in government housing!) and Jack and I decided to adapt it for our own.

Candlemas to me is the last festival of lights for the winter. Christmastime is, of course, peak lights-in-the-darkness; Candlemas is a sort of welcoming back of longer daylight hours by lighting all the candles and Christmas lights one last time before packing them all away until Halloween, when they can start making a comeback in jack-o-lanterns lighting up the darkness.

Candlemas is also, like most of the traditional holidays, a cleaning holiday. For us, this means doing a proper deep clean of the house - getting the dirt and dust out of the nooks and crannies, sorting through catchall, and thrifting what we can do without so that we go into the spring a little lighter and a whole lot cleaner!

While the hope is to do the holiday in one fell swoop, we’ve spread it out a bit this year. Mainly because I started doing work in the loft and only got through about a quarter of it (and that’s being generous) by the end of day one. For reference, the loft is a lot like our basement… although we do have an unfinished basement in this house too… So we’re stretching it out - the loft this weekend, and next weekend we’ll focus on the main floor. Who knows, maybe we’ll stretch things out one final weekend and go through the boxes that are in the basement… of course, that would be largely dependent on whether or not it’s safe traveling up and down the outside stairs - we’ll see what the snow situation is.

Well, that’s enough time spent pondering (procrastinating) - I’d better get back to work!