Coming in from the Cold
“Winter on the Isle of Sci is windy, cold and wet. The days are dark and short, the nights dark and everlasting. The land is battered by fierce northern winds, which blast icy rain and snow by day, and gust through the roof thatch by night. The sun rises low–if it rises at all–and hovers close to the horizon, barely skirting the hilltops before losing heart and sinking once more into the icy abyss of night.”
~ Stephen Lawhead, The Paradise War
Winter is a dark time. Things get cold. I don’t mean just the weather, but that is a good place to begin. My husband is one of those rare individuals who doesn’t vehemently despise the icy abyss we call Wisconsin in winter, not only enduring but being warm despite it.
“One thing I like about winter,” he says every so often, “Is how good it feels to warm up after coming in from the cold.”
He describes stepping into a warm room, shrugging off a winter coat, then sipping hot chocolate or coffee. The clinging chill streams off clothes and skin until cold itself is just a memory. Perhaps there will be gingerbread cookies to share, or something equally delicious and seasonal, and a tree in the corner shimmering with tinsel and ornaments.
Regardless of tradition, I am often struck by the absurdness of winter decorations. Red glass balls hang everywhere to no practical end. Blinking lights and brass bells add their noise to what we see and hear already. Oversized socks no one except the Abominable Snowman could wear are tacked on the wall or the mantle. We bend pieces of evergreen into circle patterns and hang them on the doors, on cars, anything with a flat surface. We sing a lot (or some people do) about how happy life is…when obviously it’s not.
Our clothes are perpetually dampened and frozen to our bodies. Car windows freeze, forcing us to open the car door at the drive-thru; snowfall ruins the upholstery. Ice on the roads turns vehicles into heavy toboggans and the term ‘bumper cars’ takes on poignant meaning. Some of us leave home when it’s dark and the daylight has come and gone by the time we return, like the sun just gave up after Halloween. We’re vitamin deficient and downtrodden. Stepping outdoors may be gambling with one’s life, or at least bones if one slips on the icy walk and suffers an unfortunate fall. It’s too dangerous to go outside–or too inconvenient–and the grocery supply dwindles with our reluctance to venture out. Now we’re all of the above, and starving (or else, learning there are one hundred ways to prepare rice, and that expired milk doesn’t actually kill you when consumed after the expiration date).
I find myself lingering at the window by my front door, craning my head to see as much as possible through the narrow pane. I can just see the evergreens clustered at the far side of the parking lot. Their branches are iced with thick, deathly white, but life endures beneath, the color of the forest. My breath catches when I see it. If I venture outside and brush the snow away, if I put my face close to the glossed needles, I will smell it: Sharp pine, ever living when other life fails. Soon enough, the snow will be gone, the sun will return. I will see green again.
Then I realize why we hang green on our doors, and place bright colors–pieces of the life we can’t see anymore–around us. We are reminding ourselves that all is not lost. We make these efforts and more to rise above the despair that winter throws upon us. This is how tradition is made, reminding us of a time when we were, for a moment, warm.
Some gestures extend through time out of mind and some are new, just found perhaps in recent weeks. In dark times we put up lights and bright things to give ourselves hope of what we do not see. Sometimes those things become milestones: Beacons lining the road to remind us we’ve come through this season before, and we will again.
Lights, vivid ornaments, hot chocolate–these stand for nothing in themselves. A blanket is only a blanket. Fire is only a release of wood’s energy. It is how we utilize these things that gives them value.
