I am speaking of that interval between Christmas and New Year’s Day, the week that is neither one thing nor the other. After Christmas is finally over and there is nothing left to do but gather up the wrapping paper, there is this hiatus, this gap, this limbo.

Wrapping paper is not recyclable. Most people just throw it away. When I was growing up, we had a fireplace in the living room, and on Christmas morning as we unwrapped our gifts we threw paper into the flames and watched it burn.

“Don’t throw in too much paper at once or it will go up the chimney and set the roof on fire!” a grown-up would invariably instruct. Probably my grandmother Rose, who was concerned with fire. Rose and my grandfather, Fred Aldrich, lived in our house with my parents, my brothers and sister and me, and whatever pets we happened to have at the time.

We didn’t save wrapping paper. I believe that my parents felt that saving such trifles was somehow miserly or mean. They did not intend to live their lives under the shadow of the Great Depression. Throw it away! they said.

Meanwhile, just up 15 Mile Road, Grandma Allen was doubtless smoothing out and folding the wrapping paper from Christmas Eve gift-giving before carefully laying it away for the following year.

Grandma, the one in our family with the most money, could certainly afford to buy new wrapping paper every year, but she was provident, prudent, thrifty, even a little scrimpy. She saved everything that might come in handy at some later date, including paper grocery bags and string (all of the meat we bought then was wrapped in butcher paper and tied with white string).

Another woman with these habits might be considered a hoarder, but Grandma was so neat and orderly and had so much storage space that there was never any question of clutter or untidiness.

People still wrap presents, but these days, as distant family members order gifts online, we’re just as apt to have Amazon boxes to clear away after the holidays.

Since the beginning of the 2020 COVID pandemic, get-togethers of all kinds have changed. There aren’t as many big, fancy holiday parties. Gatherings are still being canceled or postponed because of “the Virus.” While recent variants are in general less lethal, they are undesirable and highly contagious.

Right now, as I type this, it is still 2023, but it doesn’t seem to be. People feel as if the year 2023 is all used up, and that we are simply waiting for 2024, at which time we will be better people.

Yes, it is time to make those yearly resolutions, very likely the same resolutions as we were making a year ago, but don’t bother following them right now, because we are in this gap period.

I know, I know, we resolved last December to make improvements, but then we reneged on them. Soon we will start all over again, but it doesn’t count yet. We don’t have to start improving until 2024, in about a week.

I heard somewhere that whatever you are doing on New Year’s Eve–whatever habits or proclivities you are indulging–that is what you will most likely be doing in the year to follow, despite what you may resolve.

I just came across an unfamiliar word, synecdoche, which I may still be puzzling over in the new year. Synecdoche is a literary device in which a part of something is substituted for the whole. For example, when you refer to your car as your wheels or refer to someone as a body part (this is generally impolite or politically incorrect), or refer to businessmen as suits, or cry “All hands on deck,” that is synecdoche. (On the other hand, if you refer to the king as the crown, or the president as the Oval Office, that is metonymy. Just to be clear.)

I Googled synecdoche for pronunciation, which was not what I expected: si-NEK-duh-kee. Why, it sounds almost exactly like Schenectady! I thought. This is a mnemonic device, however, that is not helpful.

Just try to pronounce synecdoche while thinking of Schenectady. Now, if I’m tempted to use a rude epithet to describe someone, I just say to myself, “Oh, what a Schenectady.” I realize that this is conduct unbecoming to an English major, and I mean to do better in the coming year.

Have a good week.

——

(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the Lake Placid News for more than 20 years.)