L’Epifania tutte le feste si porta via. Epiphany carries away all of the festivities. 

Ah, early January. It’s the calendar equivalent of a middle-aged person’s reveille. I’m talking about the experience that happens every morning upon gaining consciousness: Your body isn’t exactly thrilled with the idea of transitioning out of bed in order to tackle a whole day of God-knows-what. And alongside the unknowns, the needle is automatically dropped onto the vinyl disc that is your life. Your brain’s personal record player is producing the playlist of what you know to be on your anticipated agenda, one that is filled with both easy and onerous pre-scheduled tasks. 

The start of a day and even a year involves a mental calculus that makes it a bit of a challenge to overcome the inertia that can be human existence. Which is all to say, early January is the point in the year where it’s going to take a bit of time before we’re all up and running.

For the predominantly non-Orthodox Christian nations of the world, last Friday marked the end of the holiday season. Epiphany was observed, and in Italy this includes the visit of both three kings and La Befana—a witch who comes and leaves either coal or candy in stockings for children to find.  This is also the day when the Christmas trees are meant to be taken down—a fairly big shift from how I’m used to seeing it in the United States. Back at home, I’m pretty sure that the tree was down at around New Year’s Day. 

But I have come to appreciate the slow rolling out of Christmas here in Italy. It makes for a gentle, easing in to all the business of the New Year. It also transforms a rather gray month into smaller, easy to negotiate pieces. It also allows me extra time before I have to carry out the underwhelming task of taking down all of the Christmas decorations.  

I was recently at Termini station early in the morning to catch a train. Having some extra time on my hands, I wandered around the quiet central station for a bit. I always like to wander down to the lower level, before descending to the Metro, and there you can make sure that it is still possible to eat a Big Mac at the McDonald’s sitting alongside a piece of the Servian Wall. After re-verifying this wild societal juxtaposition, next I walked to the main corridor in order to check out the two massive Christmas trees. 

It might have been early January, but this was still the run-up to Epiphany.  The trees were tall and twinkling, with peaks high enough so that folks on the upper level could enjoy the scene just as much as those down below. From a distance, however, the bottom of the tree looked like it was papered over in white. Like many public Christmas trees, they were adorned with hundreds of notes placed there by travelers passing though. 

The theme of the two trees was captured by small signs hung near the tree: “Il mio desiderio è…. (My wish is…). Circling the tree, there was no shortage of languages and even methods for affixing a message. Here’s a sampling:

The peril in growing older is that it can grow easier and easier to become cynical about the world and all of us people running around and doing all kinds of crazy things. I know it’s an overly simplistic antidote, but simply by walking around those big fake Christmas trees at Termini, I found the experience to be incredibly lifting. For all of the messages that I could decipher (or have translated by friends), the overarching message was incredibly simple: Just about everyone left wishes for health, security and happiness.

The world can seem like a pretty big place where we as individuals are just small actors moving around while trying not to get clipped by the other bulky matter in the atmosphere. And it can feel even harder to manage when one’s natural inclination is towards isolation—whether it’s because my smartphone is closest at hand or that I just feel super tired from whatever the day’s drudgery is prodding me with. Life can be overwhelming. Especially when you are looking at it from January. My wish this year is to remember these trees— when I get frustrated or feel bogged down. I’ll do my best to remember that we are all hoping for better things, and indeed my hope is that we can all at least a bit of it by the time next Christmas rolls around.