Recently, my spouse was working on a home repair project that required him to shut off the power. It was late afternoon when he called out a warning, then the lights went out. I was sitting with our kids in my favorite chair—it’s overstuffed and velvety and nestled beside the living room’s bay windows. We were reading what has become through the years one of our most loved wintry picture books, Wintercake.
When I finished the story of woodland creatures Thomas and Lucy and how a holiday baking mishap led to making a new friend and a new holiday tradition, I closed the book and saw that the daylight had waned. I looked around the room, noticing its darkened corners and the gentle light from the windows slanting across the walls, the shadows of tree branches flickering in the wind. I realized I’d never really experienced our home at dusk in the absence of electric light. Without the drift of music from a speaker or the refrigerator’s low hum, the house was still and strangely quiet.
I wanted to sit and take it all in. I think my kids felt it too, the softly falling darkness, the hush. I gave them a squeeze and then the power switched on, the chandelier overhead, the table lamp, the string lights on the tree all brightened, and the sound of carols returned. Like so many small moments when something unexpectedly sacred breaks into our daily routine, it was over too soon and before I could even really grasp it, it was gone.
When we first became parents I worried a lot about holiday traditions. Having left our childhood faiths, I anticipated that we would be tasked with crafting our own family rituals. Some of the traditions we’ve made quite by accident have been the sweetest surprises. Neither of us are Dutch, but one year we bought a tin of stroopwafels and discovered how cozy it is to balance a caramel cookie over a steaming mug of hot coffee so it can get warm and melty. Now, on holiday mornings, our daughter gets out the tin and breaks a stroopwafel in two for us to share.
Growing up in the Midwest, I tracked the four seasons but it wasn’t until I moved to the Pacific Northwest ten years ago that I began celebrating the summer and winter solstices. Here, the seasonal shifts in daylight feel more extreme, giving shape to our experiences. I’ve come to appreciate how the long night of the winter solstice seems capable of holding time for both grief and celebration.
One somewhat silly family tradition we observe started a couple years ago at bedtime on the summer solstice. Unable to contain her exuberance, my daughter burst out onto our second-story porch in her underwear, into the seemingly endless light, and shouted down to the street below: “Happy solstice! Happy solstice!” And as the years wheel onward, the light disappearing and returning, on the winter and summer solstices we’ve continued to gather on that porch, calling out into the night: “Happy solstice! Happy solstice!”
Other traditions have emerged with more intention. When I was nearing the end of my first pregnancy, my friend, the poet Ellen Rogers, gave me this Advent book of meditations on the natural world accompanied by woodcut illustrations. Now, each year during Advent, the season of waiting, we light candles on our table and I read to my children about how different animals sustain themselves through the long winter. How painted turtles bury themselves in the mud beneath frozen ponds. How chickadees must eat constantly to warm themselves on frigid nights. How the arteries and veins of wood frogs freeze to ice, then thaw. How these creatures retreat in winter and re-emerge in spring.
In her beautiful book Wintering, Katherine May writes:
“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
May’s reflections feel especially poignant to me as a person who has twice given birth midwinter. This time of year now reminds me of late pregnancy, the metamorphosis, the withdrawal from the world, the turn inward, the crucible. I can feel it in my bones.
These days, my infant son has reached the developmental stage in which he becomes easily distracted while nursing. I do what it takes to see to it that he’s nourished and growing, so several times a day, I take him in my arms and carry him into the darkened nursery where we sit quietly together. Sometimes I lean my head back against the rocking chair and close my eyes. When we emerge together into the hallway, I blink at the light, a bit stunned to find the rest of the world carrying on, so bright and wakeful.
I want to give to myself what I give to my children without hesitation, nourishing moments of rest. This coming holiday break, I’m hoping to truly rest. I’m realizing I’m a creature, too, and in need of the practices of wintering, time to sit quietly on cold mornings with a mug of coffee and something sweet in hand, time to hope and wait in the dark.
Here are a few other things I’ve read and enjoyed lately…
What can I tell my kids Christmas is about?
“I have come to realize that the love I share daily with my children feels holy to me, unquestionably sacred. They have given me the sense of being woven into a cycle everlasting. Becoming a mother brought my place in the universe — and the flow of humanity — into sharp, obvious view. Comforting in its simplicity, joyful in its sense of connection.
If this love I have for my children could be called my religion, then time and attention are my daily practice of it. Like many meaning-making practices, this practice is boring and frustrating at least as often as it is transcendent. However, it is also the place where I am most certain that meaning can be found, so I generally return to it without reluctance,” writes Miranda Rake.
And, a poem about mothering in the dark:
“Mother Talks Back to the Monster” by Carrie Shipers
Tonight, I dressed my son in astronaut pajamas, kissed his forehead and tucked him in. I turned on his night-light and looked for you in the closet and under the bed. I told him you were nowhere to be found, but I could smell your breath, your musty fur. I remember all your tricks: the jagged shadows on the wall, click of your claws, the hand that hovered just above my ankles if I left them exposed. Since I became a parent I see danger everywhere— unleashed dogs, sudden fevers, cereal two days out of date. And even worse than feeling so much fear is keeping it inside, trying not to let my love become so tangled with anxiety my son thinks they’re the same. When he says he’s seen your tail or heard your heavy step, I insist that you aren’t real. Soon he’ll feel too old to tell me his bad dreams. If you get lonely after he's asleep, you can always come downstairs. I’ll be sitting at the kitchen table with the dishes I should wash, crumbs I should wipe up. We can drink hot tea and talk about the future, how hard it is to be outgrown.
(Photo by Benjamin Balázs / Unsplash; Woodcut by David G. Klein.)