December arrived the way December arrived.Not suddenly. Not as the dramatic transition from one month to the next, the calendar page turned and the character of the days changed overnight. It arrived with the accumulated evidence of the season, the cold that had been building since November now settled into its proper form, the particular cold of December that was different from November’s cold not in temperature but in its quality of commitment, the cold that had stopped arriving and had simply arrived, the season in its established register.The Christmas preparations began in the city.The particular transformation of the shops and the streets, the decorations that appeared in the windows and on the lamp posts and in the particular way the city organised itself around the approach of the holiday, the Christmas music in the shops and the particular smell of the season in the cold air outside and the quality of the crowds on the Saturday streets, the shopping crowds with the specifi

He arrived at the office at eight-thirty on the twenty-third.The building was in the particular quality of the last office day before the holiday, the quiet that was not the ordinary weekday quiet but the holiday-approach quiet, the specific register of a workplace that has committed to the closure and is now in the final hours before it. Half the offices were already dark, the people who had taken their leave a day or two early, the remainder doing the particular work of the last day.He sat at his desk and began.The particular ritual of the last office day before Christmas was its own kind of work, different from the ordinary case work. It was the work of the suspension, the cases brought to a state that would hold across the two weeks of the break, the emails answered and the outstanding matters documented and the desk cleared of the accumulated material of the year in the specific way that the desk needed to be cleared for the new year to begin with the full professional attenti

They spent New Year’s Eve at home.James started cooking at three in the afternoon, the dinner he made once a year, the one that required the time. Not the efficient cooking of the weekday kitchen but the cooking as a form of care, the afternoon given to the preparation in the way that the preparation of the important meal required the afternoon rather than the hour. He moved through the kitchen with the particular attention of the cook who is making something that matters, the attention that was different from efficiency.Sophia set the table in the dining room.The good dishes, the ones that lived in the cabinet used for the occasions that required marking without the formal weight of the ceremony. The candles. The particular arrangement of the table that said this is the dinner we are eating tonight rather than the dinner we eat every night, the small deliberate making of an occasion without requiring the occasion to be large.They ate.The dinner was good. The wine was the wine Ja