Winter and the Moon of the New Year
Christmastide Day 8: Snow Day
Saturday gratefuls: Rigel’s sleeping habits. Keps. Mine. Kate’s. All different. Dogs to feed. Humans to feed. The night Sky. The International Space Station speeding past Ursa Major this morning. The waning full moon. Sleeping through the night. Amazing. Writing, back to Jennie’s Dead. A new schedule. Working. Ribeye and Lobster, today. Held over.
Remember Frau Hulda, aka Mother Christmas, from Day 2? Also called Frau Holle in Germany. Midwinter Snows are the feathers shaken from her bedspread. We’ve still got a few feathers on the ground here.
Today we celebrate Snow.
Got into Jack London as a boy. Read Call of the Wild and fell hard for his descriptions of the North. Remember Buck? I fantasized about Pine Trees, Lakes, Dog sledding, and, Snow. Snow that lasted. Snow that did not turn into the slushy melt of Indiana Januaries. Winter as a real season, not a sometimes cold, sometimes chilly, sometimes wet, sometimes icy season.
We had family vacations that took us to Stratford, Ontario for the Shakespeare Festival on the banks of the Avon. Our journey often took us to the MS Norgoma ferry from Tober Mory, Ontario, across the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron and onto Manitoulin Island.
In Stratford we camped in the Ipperswich Provincial Park, also on Lake Huron. Those travels plus Jack London’s novels put living among Pine Trees and Lakes as a stronger desire than I realized while the impressions formed.
As an adult, when I got the chance, I moved to Wisconsin, Appleton, and from there on to Minneapolis/St. Paul. I lived in the north for over 40 years, a place Jack London and Lake Huron had taught me to love.
The Winters were real. That first Winter in Appleton the temperature dropped to well below zero for a full week and we got a foot of Snow over one weekend. I discovered engine block heaters and knew folks that took their batteries out at night and brought them inside. This was 1969.
Minnesota is cold. It Snows, yes, but the big difference there is that the snow sticks around. The temperatures remain well below freezing for weeks, months. And the Sun hangs low in the Sky. When the Winds howl and the Snow blows, it can, as friend Tom Crane observed, blot out all the boundaries: fences disappear, roads, roofs, front yards and back yards.
After our move to Colorado, we’ve experienced a different Winter. On Shadow Mountain, the second Winter we were here, 2016, 220 inches of Snow fell, four feet in one storm. Minnesota typically gets between 40 and 50 inches.
But. After the Snow in the Mountains, we get warmer weather. Often, a Snow fall, no matter how big, disappears in less than a week. The Solar Snow Shovel. The Sun’s angle is a bit higher than Minnesota and we’re a good bit higher at 8,800 feet. Colorado’s blue Skies mean we get a lot of Sun shine even in the deepest midwinter. This is the arid West. Humidity outside today is 19.
What’s your Snow story? Today’s a good day to go out and play in the Snow if you have some. Perhaps a Snowball fight. A Snowman. Skiing. Snowshoes. A hike.
Tomorrow: Evergreen Day.
Andover, 2012, Bees and Apple Blossoms
Folks throng the city streets, drinking early, then drinking all the while it takes to ring in the New Year, and disperse with good cheer not long after.
Yet. Artificial constructs though they may be, New Years acknowledge two important things, at least for me. The first says, yes, our spaceship (thanks, Bucky Fuller) has carried us all the way round our Sol one more time. Unscathed. In this it also acknowledges, even if indirectly, the solar systems flight to the stars, our Milky Way galaxies flight toward Andromeda, and all the other fast movement around us that we cannot even see. Including the earth’s rotation.
Sæhrímnir
Even pagans have a conflicted relationship with nature. Yes, she provides soil for crops, rain and sun from them to grow, and game to supplement domesticated animals like goats and cows and chickens. But she also had predators in the wild like wolves and game animals like the boar, who killed many hunters.
I see two related, but different, relationships to the Winter Solstice in this story. The first, perhaps obvious, perhaps not, concerns the turning of the Great Wheel.
Magic. Earth Magic. The green covered burial mound is a chapel. The place of Morgan Le Fay, and the Green Knight may represent the older, nature focused magic, a magic that honored the chaotic reality of the natural world. A magic that confronts the civilized world of revels and knights and governments and agriculture. The organized world. Which can only understand death as finality, not as part of an ongoing cycle.
Except. Conifer. Evergreen. Pine. Maybe a Douglas Fir, a soaring Redwood, a Sequoia. A Jackpine. Still green. Yes. These cold fallow days were not all powerful. Even though the sun had begun to disappear, these trees braved the elements. Still green.
Those Romans. Hey, they were something, weren’t they? Saturnalia. Celebrated Jupiter’s overthrow of his father, Saturn. A new world order. It ran from December 17th to December 24th. A lot of decorating,gift giving, feasting, singing songs, giving each other candles to celebrate the eternal light. No Rudolf or Reindeer. Later on.
Whatever the explanation. Once I began to see, and then shed, the totalizing myths I’d been steeped in from birth… Well. I can’t unlearn the fragile and human created nature of them. The scent of fear in them, attempting to make certain an uncertain world. Building meaning for lives out of tissue paper and sealing wax. Like the Catholics who built their English churches over Celtic holy wells. Tried to absorb enough of the Faery Faith to draw the Celts away from their pagan practices. It worked. For a while. As Judaism and Islam work for a while, for many. Zoroastrianism.
This month though, the time of deepest darkness, has inspired so much wonderful music. Story. Celebration. At least for those of us in the temperate latitudes. And, I revel in it. Going down with the longest night into the well of my soul. Coming out to light an evergreen tree, hang mistletoe, holly and ivy. Santa Claus. Elves. Snow. Cold. Icicles. Sleighs. Horses with halters. Fire up the yule log. Wish I could lift a glass of grog, or ambrosia, or single malt scotch. But, alas no.