It doesn’t really feel like December until I find myself putting the final touches on a package to post or a perfectly worded clever email to someone special and realize it is well past midnight. That doesn’t bode well for the early morning run, but it is the nature of the season.

It is also that moment of clarity, realizing so much of what you are hurriedly preparing – with every attempt to make it appear unhurried – gifts, baking, notes where the bulk of the work and time could have been accomplished months ago.

The ambivalent grouch in me appears when I long for the seasonal interruptions in my schedule to just go away and simultaneously enjoy the decorating and all the miscellaneous preparations that suddenly occur.

What to do but find my way out the door and lose myself in a mid-distance run. Mid-distance because, well, marathons for the year are mostly a memory, the start of serious training for spring marathons is weeks away. Northeastern December weather in the United States still mostly in the 40’s and 50’s is also peculiar enough to make me feel out of sync.

Nothing to do but just run for the joy of running. Don’t run for pace, don’t run for a particular heart rate or distance, just run. For the joy of it.

Yesterday’s north-to-south road trip precluded a run of any distance without a headlamp or knuckle lights. With an early start, we drove under dark skies until around 7:45 a.m. With the late sunrise cloaked in gray skies, the coziness of December settled around us.

Whatever holiday you may be celebrating wherever that may be, may the coziness of the season settle in around you and those close to you.