There’s a meme that’s been going around FB lately:

A toy company makes an action figure of you. What two accessories does it come with?

I haven’t shared it yet on my own feed—I kinda feel as if I should be able to answer this question for myself before asking it of anyone else.* I have, however, been enjoying the threads on different friends’ pages, and even helped do some hypothetical problem-solving for someone who had listed “Bell, book and candle” as their accessories and hit against the arbitrary two items rule:

The bell is suspended from a ribbon of fabric also being used as a bookmark. #ProblemSolved

We pagan types gotta help each other out.

Now, I don’t have anything bell-like to discuss tonight, but I have plenty to say about books and candles.

On the books front, the Around the Year challenge group on Goodreads has posted their categories for 2021, and I am happily planning out my list. Considering what a bust 2019’s reading challenges were, I am not at all convinced I’ll uplevel the difficulty by cross-walking against the other 2 challenges I’ve sometimes done.**

I am going to follow through on my start-of-2020 aspiration to build my list from books I already own. There’s currently two exceptions to this rule: 1 category is so specific I’ll need to dip into the library for it, and another selection is the latest translation of Beowulf that I have been dying to read for months and have therefore put on my Christmas list with Mr. Mezzo. But 50 out of 52 books off my existing bookshelves? I feel pretty good about that.

As far as candles go, I know I’ve mentioned before how that is one of the key types of items that I have an LEQ* of in the house. Put a witch and a shopping addict in the same body together, and I guess it’s not all that surprising an outcome.

But here’s a weird little gratitude sidebar about living in COVID times.

Working from home means I’m able to have a candle burning on my home altar pretty much all the time. Words can scarcely express how much I love this small detail of my new daily routine. However crap a year 2020 has been—and there’s lots of ways it has been a crap year—I have found this quiet piece of comfort in lighting my candles every day.

A light, a spell, a prayer. Intention made manifest.

The side side bonus is I can actually see myself working through some of the candle backlog, too. Now, I’d be working through it faster if I hadn’t recently discovered a wonderful new small batch candle-maker. (Mythologie, I’m looking at you!) Still, forward progress is better than negative progress.

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* Cue my customary indecisiveness &overthinking: too many choices….

** Neither of those lists has been posted, so I’ll make the final call at that point.

*** LEQ=Lifetime-Exceeding Quantity.

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Image credits: Both photos taken by the author, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.