{"id":4068,"date":"2010-12-22T21:40:45","date_gmt":"2010-12-23T05:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/?p=4068"},"modified":"2010-12-22T21:50:09","modified_gmt":"2010-12-23T05:50:09","slug":"invisible-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2010\/12\/22\/invisible-light\/","title":{"rendered":"Invisible light"},"content":{"rendered":"

Feeling discombobulated as usual around this time of year – hence the dearth of posts lately – I found myself poking around this afternoon for inspiration at Russell Books<\/a>, Canada’s largest used-and-new bookstore.<\/p>\n

Careening toward the self-help section, suddenly I saw it<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

Yule – A Celebration of Light & Warmth… <\/em><\/p>\n

As if.<\/p>\n

I am anything but light and warmth these days. I am invisible.<\/p>\n

…Or at least marked down, to half price.<\/p>\n

Feeling a bit like A Boy Named Sue<\/a>, I once again bit on the irony of being named, by my weird parents, after a pagan festival. Emigrating to Canada and using my second name (Fredericka) as a bulwark against the first-name weirdness did not help: North Americans are inordinately fond of short, preferably mono-syllabic names. Therefore, a four-syllable male-derived moniker such as mine was naturally shortened first to Freddy, …then to Fred. Not<\/em> what a young girl was looking for – which explains why, by the impressionable age of 16 (and under the influence of an art teacher) I returned to my first name. …And I spend a lot of time explaining that, no, it’s not pronounced as one syllable, but two.<\/p>\n

Sure wish I could get the hang of that warmth & light thing…<\/p>\n

PS: Looking at the editorial description on Amazon, I read that Morrison suggests that “Many people believe that Santa’s reindeer ‘represent the stags that drew the chariot of the Norse gift-giving goddess, Freya.'” Ah yes, Freya. That’s one of my sister’s names. There are seven of us – we’ve got the Edda<\/a> covered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Feeling discombobulated as usual around this time of year – hence the dearth of posts lately – I found myself poking around this afternoon for inspiration at Russell Books, Canada’s largest used-and-new bookstore. Careening toward the self-help section, suddenly I saw it: . Yule – A Celebration of Light & Warmth… As if. I am […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1242],"tags":[31120],"class_list":["post-4068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just_so","tag-yule"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4068"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4074,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4068\/revisions\/4074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}