What is it about January?

What is it about January that makes us start projects, and what is it that makes us not go through with so many of them?

Overnight fermented wholegrain squares at 7 am.

The wake-up light alarm tweets softly at 5 am on a January morning and I go downstairs, night still numbing my brain, sleep still hovering on my skin. In the kitchen, the baking table is on the counter together with a measuring jug half-full of flour. I sprinkle some on the baking table before I pour the overnight fermented dough onto it. The dough crawls out of the hollow of the bowl, slowly at first, yawning all its gluten threads into their full length until they can't hold on anymore, and the whole mass lands quietly in the bosom of the flour.

Just after new year's my family decided to make pizza, and I browsed for a crust recipe. I found one that required overnight fermentation. Just before bedtime, I mixed the ingredients, happy with the notion that it would mind its own business until the next morning. The pizzas were the best we have ever made. A few days later we had a cold spell and defrosted the freezer. We threw a lot of old stuff into the food recycling bin and ended up with the bread drawer empty. I decided to fill it – the largest in the freezer– with overnight fermented bread.

For the past ten years I have instructed a weekly class at a Swedish gym chain. Most weeks the studio is filled with enthusiasm, but usually only half-full of people. Come January the booking goes through the roof, though. My class is fully booked every week, with a waiting list, and this year more than in any of the post-pandemic years. Extra hosts are volunteering, and the gym is sizzling with energy. This goes on through January and February, but somewhere in late March or early April it fades into a more regular booking pace. It's the same pattern every year. I am vainly flattered by the full classes, with people scattered all over the studio floor with neighbouring feet and arms in their immediate vision. I love that people want to start moving, but too often what may have been a new year's resolution fizzles out and is forgotten. I can only hope for their sake and for the public health that the people who stop coming to the gym keep moving, somehow.

What is it then about January that makes people start something so enthusiastically at the new year only to let it trickle out like a fart in the universe in March? I thought I was immune to this behaviour, but standing with my hands in the dough in the early morning I realize I do it too. The overnight fermented bread is my gym card, and there have been many others like it through the years. Some have stuck, others have faded and been forgotten after a couple of months, yet others have come back at irregular intervals. One year it was sprouting. I had several parallel sprouting containers going and the freezer packed with finished batches (some of them thrown out in this year's defrosting). My browser reading list was full of sprout recipes. For my son's graduation reception, I spent a couple of months sprouting and making veggie balls with sprouted lentils and mung beans for 40 guests. Two years later, my daughter firmly asked me not to make them for hers. I'm thinking about taking it up again, though. Another year it was weekly menus. Enthusiastically I made charts with different themes for different weekdays and encouraged my family to fill in their suggestions, but the project died long before March. The seaweed period ran even shorter, but my browser reading list is still full of recipes with sugar kelp, laminaria and bladderwrack, quietly mocking me. There may even be a bag of dried sea lettuce still lurking in the pantry. The overnight oats trend stuck, though; it is still my daily breakfast.

I pour some flour on top of the settling dough and divide it into bun sized portions, move each mindfully onto the oven tray and slide it into the oven. While it does its thing I practice yoga asana, one January project that has stuck and lighted my daily rituals for the past few years. When I step off the mat, the smell of bread fills the ground floor, long before 7 am.

A second theme this year is mending, more than I usually do. It started with a book I got for Christmas, about mending with Sashiko. I fixed a couple of holes in a wool biking t-shirt with patches cut from a pair of wool long johns with too many holes and ladders to make mending them worth the effort. The cardigan I wear when I go cold bathing is already full of colourful mending patches in different techniques. I added another technique for some newly acquired holes. Sashiko stitches on the threadbare thigh of a pair of jeans. I secretly long for more torn spots to practice on.

Sashiko mended jeans are on my gym card this year.

Yes, my January gym card has lots of classes and I want to take them all. I don't mind if I have given up half of my projects come April. I get to do them and enjoy them while they last. I don't know which will stick and which will fade into memories in my reading list. Right now, there are bread recipes at the top of it and I keep adding to it. A fresh new year, dreams of filling it with whatever I think will give me new energy. Perhaps it’s as simple as that. Apparently, the answer for me is bread this year.

At 8 pm I start a new overnight fermentation while thinking of the next one. Perhaps wholegrain buns with lots of seeds. Or plain white ones with anis and fennel. Cumin! The possibilities are endless. After all, there is still space in the bread drawer, and it's only mid-January.

What classes are on your gym card?