What I Look Forward To

Today we launched #BlogHerWritingLab on BlogHer.com. Every month has a theme and a set of writing prompts. You can join us on Twitter with #BlogHerWritingLab or join our Facebook group. December's theme is tradition.

What end-of-the-year tradition do I look forward to?

I hate the cold. I'm not fond of the dark. I've never understood people who like their sunlight blue. My least favorite time of year is high school wrestling season, when I would stand in the cafeteria after cheerleading practice and the sky through the atrium windows was black before five in the afternoon.

Black in the morning on the way to school, black in the car as I drove home. Chapped palms and dry lips that itched against my sweater as I pulled it off, my hair floating up around my eyelashes and a shock greeting me when I touched the door handle to go to my room for bed.

Somewhere in there, I found candles.

These days I use the LED variety most places in the house because my sister lost everything in a house fire in college and I've always been terrified of big fires in the fields when my uncles burned the terraces, but now I have a brick fireplace with a metal grate, and behind that grate in the place where a fire will live once we can afford to fix the chimney or the gas line, I burn real candles almost every night once the time has changed and the darkness creeps across the sill earlier every day.

Candle flames dance in such a fearless way we use them to symbolize strength and faith and endurance, in religious ceremonies and vigils and at funerals and baptisms and weddings. We use them to symbolize barely contained power that both sustains life and takes it away.

I'm closest to my anxiety in the cold and dark months, and so I light candles until the sun returns to take their place.