The wrapping has been opened, discarded and binned.
The presents have been embraced, enjoyed, and in may cases quietly put aside, because you didn't really need more socks this year anyway.
The New Year has trundled past, and taken all your resolution with it in a haze of fireworks and frenzied drinking... or else quiet contemplation in front of the Jools Holland Show. You've reached the second week of January, and the festivities seem so far away already. It's mid-winter, the growing cold is to be grimly absorbed, and another year stretches out, now stripped of any revelry to make that fact seem special.
But here and there, there are still Christmas lights; left up in windows, left out on the street, clinging to lampposts in quiet defiance of the season. They will be swept away quite soon, for Twelfth Night has come and gone, and it is inviting bad luck to leave them out.
But until they go, they glitter in the chill, and drive the gloom away.
And once they are gone, their memory will glitter all the same. Something to look forward to, as the year goes on.
Isn't it so pretty, when the Christmas lights go up?