December, and the year's last light

Late December in my hometown is not a dramatic season. The hills go grey, the sky keeps a low lid of cloud for days at a time, and the cold settles into the rooms the way it always has, damp and patient. There is no central heating in Anhui, so we live close to the heat. My grandmother’s kitchen is the warmest room in the house, and everyone ends up there eventually, gathered around the stove, doing nothing in particular. That is what I remember most clearly about the end of the year: the events mattered less than the arrangement of people around a small source of warmth.

When I was small, December was the longest month. The days between the last exam and the first firecracker stretched like a country road. We measured time in small rituals, the pickling jars filled and set in the cold corner, the quilts beaten and aired, the house swept with a thoroughness it would not see again until the following year. Nobody explained why these things mattered, and nobody needed to. They were simply what the end of the year was.

Somewhere along the way I stopped measuring time that way. The years now pass as a sequence of targets: this term, this exam, this application, this deadline. Each one arrives, is survived, and is replaced by the next. I catch myself referring to seasons by what they contain, exam season, application season, rather than by what they look like. The calendar has become a list of things to get through, and I suspect most people around me feel the same. We have all learned to count time by its obligations.

The strange thing is that December still insists on its old rhythm. Even in a year that has run on deadlines, the last weeks slow down on their own. The street stalls appear with red lanterns and spring couplets before the date calls for them. People start saying ‘next year’ instead of ‘this year’ even though the new year is weeks away. It is as if the month itself refuses to be just another item on the list, and we let it have its way.

I have started to think that the end of the year exists for exactly this reason, to remind us that time is not only something we spend. We measure a year in what we achieved, in marks, in offers, in savings, and the measure is fair enough, but it is incomplete. The year is also made of evenings like this one, the grey sky, the warm kitchen, the unhurried conversation. Those hours carry no exchange value. They do not appear in any ledger. And they are the ones I remember.

The last light of the year, when it comes, arrives early and goes quickly. On clear evenings the sun sets over the hills behind the city before five, and the far ridges take on the particular orange that only December manages, low and almost apologetic. My grandmother calls it ‘the old sun’. I have no idea where the phrase comes from. I only know that she says it every year, and that it sounds right. The old sun, going down over a year that is nearly done.

The new year will bring its own list, and I will be ready for it. But for these few days, I am letting the calendar do what it wants. The pickling jars are full, the kitchen is warm, and the light is going down over the hills. The year does not owe me a summary. It has already given me the kitchen, the grey sky and the old sun.