a new story from an old world

It's still grey outside, I guess everybody at home is asleep. I'll wrap myself in a blanket as well, till I still have the safe margin of the before-day, the pause that nobody takes into consideration when evaluating the day. I feel like defeating the time when sitting like this, as if on the edge of a chair, lingering over the moment that was supposed to be only a short minute between waking up and beginning the daily actions. It feels good down here.
In order to make the best of the Sunday's before-day, I checked the updates on the JW's website. It smells of conifer needles and it calms me down; there's a road leading from here column straight to Christmas. "...because that is what the Christmas story is – a new story from an old world". I love her sketches of the holidays, they're "old-fashioned" in the most positive sense, quiet, made of wood, snow and red-hot oven with her favorite mince pies. I'll have to keep this picture somewhere in the back of my head for the two weeks to go to my final coming home for Christmas. These are going to be two tough weeks, and the tiredness won't let me work as hard as I'd like to. I really hate what the studies make of the December-January season, I don't like mixing Christmas with stress, New Year – with the challenge of passing eight exams waiting just right on my doorstep. It disturbs the silence. And when I sit in the basements of our Institute during our long-winded, arduous classes, the dense air and artificial light make my thoughts ferment and spin pictures of a summer countryside, of the warmth, abundance and the bitter smell of the meadow. I seize those few colors very tightly and anxiously as if I knew it's the only way to preserve some juice, life and freshness in myself. It's hard, without a moment's respite. I guess I'm still getting used to it.
That's way I'm so glad that in the middle of the endless list of things to do this moment of the before-day has come up, this hiding place when I can read the Christmas story by JW for the second time. I must have been absent-minded last year as my thoughts bounced off the words; I didn't get into the story. This time my concentration was also a bit disturbed, but I managed to see this text and feel it as compatible with the Christmas vision by JW, full of quiet anxiety and secret; a soft night in which the light appears as a blessing, neither a Christian one nor Muslim nor Buddhist, but a humane one. A humanistic one.
JW saved another piece of my thought.
I can hear guys getting up.