An invented holiday season
Tolkientide
January 6 — February 13
Thirty-nine days for remembering that the ordinary world is the enchanted one.
Free. No sign-up. Nothing to buy.
January and February are the dreariest part of the year. Christmas is over with that abrupt back-to-school let down, the calendar is empty, and spring is a long way off.
Tolkientide fills that gap on purpose. It runs from Epiphany, the day the wise men arrive, to the day before Valentine’s Day — thirty-nine days of Tolkien, Lewis, Chesterton and Capon, of the Silmarillion and the films and one episode of Planet Earth, kept at home with whoever is in the house.
It is not an escape into fantasy. It is a round trip. You leave the world on purpose, you stay away long enough to lose the habit of it, and you come back a stranger — and the place you were bored of turns out to have been the enchanted one the whole time.
The trouble with ordinary life is not that it is dull. It is that it is expected, and what you expect you stop seeing. Nothing gets added to the world during Tolkientide. The fog comes off it.
The shape of it
Five movements, 39 days
One short note a day. Each one takes two minutes to read and names one thing to do — a chapter, a film, an onion, a walk outside in the cold.
Days 1–6
Setting Out
Epiphany, and the honest naming of January. You open the oldest book on the shelf and stop trying to keep track of the names.
Days 7–13
The Making
The world gets sung into being, twice. Then an onion, a sunrise, and the discovery that mundane never meant boring.
Days 14–20
The Long Middle
The dreary stretch, met head on. Small people, ordinary courage, a long defeat, and a painter who never finished his tree.
Days 21–30
The Turn
The sudden joyous turn, a walk at Oxford in 1931, and the claim the whole season rests on: that this one is true.
Days 31–39
Coming Back
You return as a visitor from a different land, and find the place you left full of gods and titans doing the dishes.
The whole thing, in four lines
How to keep it
Mark the dates
January 6 to February 13. Every year. They do not move.
Read the day’s note
Two minutes. It names one thing to do, and the thing is usually already in your house.
Do it where people are
Read aloud, watch together, cook the thing. Half the point is that someone else is in the room.
Come back and look around
On February 13 the season hands you back to ordinary time and one particular person across one particular table.
You are welcome to keep it too
Tolkientide was made up by one family, in one house, because January was grey. It costs nothing, belongs to nobody, and needs no permission. Take it, change it, name your own.
#Tolkientide