Today, on January 7th , I’m putting away Christmas. I’ve brought in all the tubs from the garage and am trying to remember how and where it all fits: the stained glass nativity set, the wooden Santas with delicate dangling lanterns and church warden pipes, the felt wreaths and the forest of glittery trees. I felt a growing swell of some unidentifiable emotion as I taped bubble-wrap and separated icicles from snowflakes, and so I stopped to pull a card, as I so often do to help me name and place what is happening within.
I drew 5 of Pentacles, reversed, which is relevant and resonate on so many levels that I kind of wanted to cry.
A couple of years ago, my youngest daughter and I were looking through a Rider-Waite-Smith deck card by card. I would ask her what she thought they showed or what they “meant”, and when we got to 5 of Pentacles, she said, “That looks like window shopping at Christmas!”
I can only assume that she saw people standing outside of a brightly lid window, in the snow, and that was all. She didn’t note their rags and the suggestion of estrangement and dejection in this card. Of course, her observation was much more insightful than she knew. 5 of Pentacles *is* window shopping at Christmas. It is being on the outside of warmth and abundance. It is being at a remove from comfort and belonging. It is being surrounded by the trappings of joy, having it so close at hand, but not being able to access it, for whatever reason.
So many of us feel that way during the holiday season. Our various estrangements stand in stark relief against the strident TOGETHERNESS of Christmas. Our sorrows seem to tarnish the silvery sheen of yuletide gay. We feel poor. Money may be scarce. “Christmas spirit”-whatever that really means-is elusive.
To pull this card reversed, as I pack away all these bright little bits of glass and plastic, amuses and relieves me. The sense of estrangement can recede, now that the pressure to perform our merriment is past. The energetic depletion that shows up in 5 of Pentacles—fatigue from too much to do, the empty wallets from too much spending—will ease. It’s good. And yet.
And yet all that I’ve been thinking, as I note the history of each ornament, is of the passing of time. The wooden loon from a trip to Minnesota, to visit an uncle who died years ago. The little picture-frame featuring the face of a childhood friend that I haven’t spoken to in 5 years. There’s the Santa Lucia-only one little candle left on her crown after 30 some Christmases-that represents my mother’s Swedish heritage, my mother who is diligently organizing all the paperwork I will need upon her death. The little yarn owl that I bought the year I was pregnant with my first daughter. I was with my then-husband at the beach. Now, he is a stranger.
I pack these things carefully, testing the weight of the boxes that we’ll haul up to the attic, so that they’ll be easier to bring down 11 months from now. I assume that I’ll be here to do it. But the truth is, I don’t know. None of us know. Life is so precarious. And if I’m here, god willing, who will be alongside me? What will the world look like? Will we have been more thoroughly abandoned by our government that we are, even now? Will the gulf between us as fellow citizens have grown ever wider? Will we still be so sick? Will we still be so poor? Will we still be refusing to do anything about the climate crisis?
All of these are 5 of Pentacles issues. None of these questions can be packed away with my baubles and bells. And no answers will satisfy, because the truth is likely uncomfortable, and besides, the future is unknowable. The only response I can possibly make, the only one that makes any sort of sense, is to reach out for connection wherever and whenever I can.
