Maybe it’s time to take a short breather to enjoy the holiday season

December is always a mad rush.

It’s been that way since I worked retail in a men’s shop while I was in graduate school in college. You’d think it would be easier doing garden broadcasting and writing now like I do, but it just seems to add up. I look forward to the two weeks around the holidays as being my time to catch my breath and get ready for spring.

It’s times like this that I most enjoy looking out our north window across our back landscape and the dry creek bed that only flows during heavy rains.

Only while the trees are bare in the winter, can I see to the other side of our property. It’s only 11 rural acres in size, but it’s amazing how all the foliage compresses it in during the growing season.

This time of year, however, it takes on an entirely different appearance. We get to see the squirrels leaping from branch to branch. We see dozens of birds of all species, many of them frequenting our feeders.

Several days ago, while I was quietly eating my breakfast, I saw a doe and her fawn grazing across the meadow and strolling out of sight. I’m not thrilled to have deer in our gardens, but there was something serenely beautiful about seeing them. I needed to see that before I resumed my mad pace of book signings and radio recordings.

I’ve collected sundials for at least 40 years. I have perhaps a dozen that I bought new, and I have four or five that are antiques. I’m a clock collector at heart, and so the art of keeping time has always been fascinating to me. When I look out into the forest of oak and pecan trees that surrounds our house, I see the tree trunks as giant natural gnomons just like I see on my sundials.

I’m also an avid photographer, and so I see the color of light. There’s a beauty of early morning and late afternoon light at this time of the year, and when it low-angles its way through the tree trunks, it magnifies the beauty of the natural setting. There’s nothing much prettier than the amber tones of late afternoon casting long, lovely parallel shadows across the grass on that hill on the other side of the creek. I could look at it for hours.

The outdoors can be so quiet in the evenings. Crickets are stilled by the chill. Frogs are hibernating until spring. Coyotes howl in our distance, and that’s going to be different from what most urban readers will experience. But otherwise, on most nights, there’s very little to hear when I step outside.

I’ve taken advantage of that solitude and I’ve invested in some musically tuned windchimes (musicofspheres.com). I have five sets that play different melodies. I have hung them at heights ranging from 15 to 30 feet up in my pecan trees. Some of them play deep, resonant notes. Others have higher pitches and bright, cheery sounds. With the trees being bare during the winter, the chimes play their music gleefully. It adds a great deal to our surroundings.

We have professionally designed landscape lighting in our trees. We’ve had it for 25 years. It has extended the time that we can enjoy our outdoors each evening during the growing season, And I really can’t imagine having a landscape without it. I have to admit that when it was installed I wondered if we would like it in the wintertime. I wondered if the lamps would be distracting – if they might be too visible.

That has never been a problem for me. With the advent of LED lighting, the fixtures have gotten much smaller and so it is especially unnoticeable now. What it gives you is full moonlight 365 nights per year. That’s great for safety and security, but it also is wonderful for enhancing the natural beauty of your landscape and of your home. And, if we ever get snow again here in North Texas, having landscape lighting in place, that snow will become ultimately beautiful!

So those are some of the things that let me enjoy quiet times of midwinter to the fullest. I can kick back, catch up and enjoy the off-season, even if it’s only for a couple of weeks.

There’s a lot to be said for the quiet time of the winter.

You can hear Neil Sperry on KLIF 570AM on Saturday afternoons 1-3 pm and on WBAP 820AM Sunday mornings 8-10 am. Join him at www.neilsperry.com and follow him on Facebook.