There’s nothing like Tomten being as tall as the snow-covered pines to warp your sense of perspective.
I celebrated Christmas at the first dining table I’ve owned in my adult life, a solid oak investment piece we had to enlist family to help us carry into the house. The day before Christmas, I arranged folded paper trees, pine cones and clove-studded oranges across the length of its centre, pressed moss pulled from rocks in the forest into the advent-candle stand. I placed small plates on top of large ones (mainly, as I’d admit the next day upon everyone’s surprise, because it looked fancy) and looped napkins around knives and forks. Setting your very own table for a family celebration is something of a homemaker’s dream, I imagine.
We had, I should say, a kitchen table before this one; an old, varnished pine whose angular limbs were always ready and waiting to bruise a leg lifted in the wrong direction. I am thankful to the previous guardian of this house for leaving it behind. For the first few weeks here, it became the command centre of our home; the place where decisions on other pieces of furniture were made, where I put a pin in any fears and anxieties I felt at being somewhere so new to add words to a blank document. That table came up from its new home in the food cellar to take up temporary residence in the kitchen again; folded into its smallest configuration, it acted as a buffet table for our Julafton feast, hosting homemade vegan meatballs, egg halves topped with dill and seaweed caviar, a red cabbage salad that turned out crunchier than I’d hoped.
Now, three days after Christmas Eve, the leftovers are just about gone, and the tablescape I’d longed to assemble has been packed carefully away, its various components saved or discarded. The solid-oak table, still a relative newcomer in our home, is bare again, its predecessor returned to the basement. Predictably, this shift in my surroundings is accompanied by a changing energy, a desire to lay a difficult year to rest and move forward with the task of organising my entire life. It makes sense for such an undertaking to begin in the kitchen, where overripe bananas are waiting to be chopped up and frozen, and rings of grease around the hobs call out to be scrubbed.
I don’t want to leave this year behind without thanking you for being here. My creative practice was just one victim that fell to the vortex of what was 2022, but of the little writing I did manage to do, this newsletter was one of my favourite projects to work on. I have loved letting the lens of my mind collect fragments to spread out and make words from, and I’m very grateful to each of you who’ve read them. See you on the other side.
My short story collection, Tools For Surviving A Storm, is out now.
‘In a transporting, original collection, Nadia Henderson examines the lines between nature and the human world through stories set in landscapes both brutal and beautiful.’