By Maddie Hoagland-Hanson

A week or so ago, as I lay on my common room floor reading Wallace Stevens and trying to think intelligently (a task I have been finding increasingly difficult of late), I was disturbed by a rush of loud music from the apartment below mine, accompanied by the palpable thump of an electric bass line. This would not have been out of the ordinary if, after a few moments of unintentional hearkening, I hadn’t recognized the music as some bizarre, beat-laden version of “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

Leaving aside the disturbing fact of the existence of the music itself (what part of “Above thy deep and dreamless sleep / The silent stars go by” demands to be made syncopated and danceable?), I have to say that I was miffed. I tried to fix my attention on Mr. Stevens’ periphrasis, but downstairs, the carols continued and would not be denied. After “O Little Town of Bethlehem à la the artist formerly known as Prince,” I was serenaded with the strident tones of “Joy to the World à la Metallica,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town à la Brand New,” and “The Christmas Song à la Nat King Cole,” which was the only one that didn’t make me want to plug my ears with coal and sob quietly into a cushion.

Don’t get me wrong; I love Christmas. Though it might surprise some who know me better, I am not, by all accounts, a Grinch about the holidays. Being from Philly, I have always been particularly attuned to the way in which the eminent arrival of Christmas spruces up (pun intended) the city, and even though I realize that most commercial enterprises are only decking the halls in order to get me to consume more useless crap—chocolate, shoes, perfume, novelty stocking stuffers—I appreciate a good hollyhock or two nonetheless and have always been, raccoon-like, a sucker for small incandescent lights strung over almost anything.

This year, though, I’ve been having trouble feeling in the least bit festive. In fact, I am confused. How did it get to be December already? Two days ago, I could have sworn it was September. All of a sudden, wet, unpleasant snowflakes are falling from the sky, the people who live below me are blasting “Swindle All the Way: A Very Commercial Christmas” on seemingly continuous loop, and I am being told that it is time to take finals when I still feel as though midterms are in order. Somehow, this has been the shortest semester I’ve ever had.

Seniors will forgive me for saying that I think it must be because I’m a junior that things are suddenly moving so fast. I’m going abroad to Scotland next semester, a sojourn that will constitute a full four months or so away from Haverford, and although I would by no means assert that Haverford and I don’t need some space, I also foresee my own utter shock and confusion upon returning to America and realizing that I only have two semesters left at college. Tidings of comfort and joy, indeed.

Every holiday has become, for me, a revolving oracular fulcrum, an unbidden opportunity to stare broodingly into the past and bleakly into the future, finally turning back to the present to say something along the lines of, “Youth by definition is wasted.” The other day I found myself gazing, transported by abstracted contemplation, at a small evergreen tree in HCA someone had crisscrossed with white lights, until the person I was walking with interrupted my reverie with a single word: “Freshman.” As in, remember when you, too, might have run a string of lights out of your window to decorate a live tree, instead of holing up in your apartment for days at a time making dour pronouncements about your youth, which is still here, and present, and, in some sense, waiting for you?

Yes, I remember, and it’s true that I’m beginning to feel like a broken record that was playing just fine until it hit an insurmountable scratch in the form of the halfway point of my college career. Looking back on the seven articles I’ve written for the Bi-Co this semester, I’m realizing that almost every single one represents an eight-hundred word, prose-form existential crisis. I have become Haverford’s very own J. Alfred Prufrock, every article some variation on “I grow old…I grow old…It is impossible to say just what I mean!” This formula always culminates, at last, in a final turn towards the positive side of things, an admission that things are, or will be, all right after all—God and sinners, reconciled.

I know it seems as though every week I set up my demons just to knock them down, but the passage of time is no paper tiger. I don’t pretend to slay it on a bi-weekly basis; I just put out my palm for it to sniff. This is what I write because this is where my head’s at, and I end where I do because it’s where I want to be: reconciled. ‘Tis the season, or so I hear, to string lights across the still face of winter, so I know I’m not alone as I resettle my stylus to wish you, dear reader, a happy new year.

Hoagland-Hanson, a junior English major, can be reached at mhoaglan@haverford.edu.

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