It’s dark now before dinner, even getting dark as the older kids leave school and get home about 3:30 p.m. Frank complains that there isn’t enough time to play outside after school; Caroline doesn’t like how the sky is “sunset-y” when we come home. At the other end of the day, the sun is taking longer to climb into the sky every morning. Not for nothing is this considered the end of the year. It seemed harder for everyone to adjust to the shortening hours of daylight this year because the early weeks of November were so mild. It shouldn’t be dark by 5 p.m. and still 60 degrees outside. Maybe that’s what has made it so hard for me to think about Thanksgiving, Advent and the Christmas holiday to come in the days just after Halloween. Or maybe it was living life with a baby in the house. Teresa is 10 months old and still changing every day (she’s recently discovered the joy she can give people by randomly repeating consonant sounds; the other day she was fixated on “d” and said “da-da-da” over and over). From her perspective, a month away is the distant future. And yet. And yet the advertisements and catalogues and sale fliers are multiplying in my mailboxes (e- and snailmail). My dentist’s office had Christmas music playing two weeks before Thanksgiving. And yet Caroline is talking about not making her Christmas list, but refining it, to make it more clear what she really wants. She also has embraced gift-giving, and I have to say, her Christmas shopping is way ahead of mine. Frank is looking beyond Christmas and trying desperately to get his dad and I to give him the go-ahead to plan a spring break trip. We can’t do that yet, we say. We don’t know what the new year will hold. We have to wait. We have to watch. That puts us all back in the position we were in as small children, when we didn’t know what was going to happen and we didn’t think it was our job to decide anyway. Caroline’s Christmas shopping and Frank’s trip planning show their burgeoning maturity; an adult is someone who is responsible, who has a plan, who makes decisions wisely. But the spirit of Advent is not one of frantic planning. It is a time of waiting, a time of wondering and a time of asking what the future will hold. I might not be ready for mistletoe and holly, but waiting … that I can do.