I find the hustle and bustle of this time of year to be almost ironically the opposite of how we should be spending this time. Winter should be for retrospection and isolation of self, but instead we expend our energy, stretch it even further thin than we normally do. If you celebrate Christmas, it can be an intense time, spent mostly with others and probably ending with an exhausted huff when you do finally have a moment to yourself. New Year’s Eve and Day, which is only significant to the Gregorian calendar, can be even more exhausting, performative, and guilt ridden. We analyze our calendar years and feel like we haven’t done enough. The season of winter is a challenging one for us humans, simply because we made it that way.