…As we wait in joyful anticipation…
While the very beginning of ‘Swan Lake’ opens with the sly and mysterious Introduction, it is this Allegro giusto that shall set us off on this year’s sparkle sequence. It is a more fitting musical introduction of preparatory excitement, building the anticipation, and hinting at the shine and shimmer of such seasonal exuberance. It is this piece that marks the entrance of our holiday season, as an impossibly-magnificent coat of pink swings out behind us, unfurling in billowing fashion.
Today marks our unofficial start to the season, as christened by a sparkling event – The Pride Center Gala – that may be the new kick-off we need in the age of on ongoing pandemic. Andy and I haven’t been to a public event like this since 2019, so in many ways this feels like a recalled-to-life moment, fraught with all the frisson that such a grand return brings.
It used to be the Beaujolais Nouveau Wine Festival that started our holiday season rolling, and this has the same energy and feel to those golden days, with a comforting sense of both wariness and resignation that the world has forever altered. We have been changed as well. We can never go back to before, and so we forge new paths, finding new ways of celebration, be they comprised of gestures grand or miniscule~ or something wonderfully and whimsically in-between.
The holiday season has changed quite a bit for us – the days of immense and bombastic parties and extravagantly-overhyped events have fallen happily by the wayside, replaced with smaller dinners and intimate gatherings where friends can actually talk and share things with friends, Sunday dinners with immediate family, and short weekends in Boston, quietly ensconced in a candle-lit condo while the city whirls its winter dervishes of wind against the windows.
The music turns like a little ballerina on a music box, and we have shifted to a Waltz – a majestic beast in traditional 3/4 time – and it carries us to lofty heights – landings on dim staircases overlooking swirling party scenes below, where banisters adorned with sparkling boughs of evergreen and eucalyptus keep their perfumed secrets, winking and blinking at the unaware crowds laughing beneath them.
Swept back down, along a staircase that was once cramped with revelers, we shall rejoin the party, as if we were rejoining life after some extended state of suspension, like some vampire that slept a century in a silk-lined coffin, only to wake in tattered confusion, and having to start again. One finds the world greatly transformed in ways one never thought possible. It very much feels like we have been asleep for three long years. Where does one find the lifeblood after so much stagnant time away? Where does one find the energy to sparkle and shine? Where is the compass or map to help guide us through these overgrown paths? I seek for answers, I look for keys, I search the skies for signs.
Perhaps it’s in a crystal brooch, or a necklace of semi-precious stones. Perhaps it’s in a diamond and sapphire ring to set off a coat of velvet rose. Perhaps it’s in the smoky wisps of a perfume that smells like it was delivered in an ancient decanter of Venetian glass, unmarked and sealed with some spell of enchantment, leaving a trail of sultry sillage in its wake. Hints of antique roses and sacred incense like fairies wreathed with flowers and dancing about a fire.
And so our holiday season gingerly opens, as both a return and a new beginning – armed by a calmer yet more formidable sense of what truly matters, accented by a willingness to be open to all things, and to all people.
