The Stretch of Winter After Christmas
January 2024: A letter for people who struggle with the dark, cold months before springtime.
Dear family, friends, and Internet strangers,
I hope your 2024 is off to a wonderful start! Ed and I visited his family in rural Pennsylvania for Christmas, and then, as if to maximize contrast, we drove to Brooklyn in New York City to visit friends for a week.
Peaceful days of birdsong and the honks of geese, topped off with a deer sighting, changed quickly to the honks of cars—New York City’s native language—and so many things to do, including a lovely visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. My brain is still digging up memories I forgot we made (“Oh, we did stop by Rockefeller Center!”).
I’ve been to Manhattan before, but I was a lot younger. I remember going at 8 and 15 years old, and maybe one other time when I was young. It’s different as an adult, now that I am much better at observing people and buildings, much less picky about food (I remember eating a baguette in Grand Central Station when I was 15 because I couldn’t find anything else that sounded good), and able to draw on actual experiences for understanding things.
In Manhattan, I finally felt like I understood this line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” That book was published in 1925 and takes place on Long Island; that line aptly captures the sense I had in Manhattan in 2023. It’s as if all the world has been dumped into a kaleidescope. It’s compelling and repelling at the same time. Brooklyn felt like a peaceful town in comparison.
After we were home, I wrote this in my journal: “New York City, especially Manhattan, felt something like playing in ocean waves. Like I could drown. […] Like I was playing around in a very tiny portion of something far too wide and deep and various for me to ever fully grasp, but that allows me to exist in it for a little while, or really, something that is indifferent to my existence almost entirely.”
Re: “The Medium, the Message, and You”
In reply to my December letter, which connects the aphorism “the medium is the message” to predictive text and its effect on our communication, a friend and subscriber sent me this video:
(Johnny Harris, “How China Conquered the Keyboard”, YouTube, 26 August 2021)
It’s interesting, partly because I have wondered how China managed to fit their non-alphabet-based language into the keyboard paradigm, and partly because the answer is, essentially, predictive text. If the subject of my December letter interests you, you may find this video interesting, too.
Winter Tips Nobody Asked Me For
The majority of this section may be useless to my Florida-based subscribers. Since moving to Indianapolis more than eight years ago, I’ve found people have a hard time with the short, dark days between Christmastime and spring. Though each day of winter is longer than the last, it doesn’t necessarily feel that way to people who just want it to warm up already, or to people whose jobs’ hours require them to leave and return in the dark.
Generally, I don’t want to rush through winter. I want to make the most of winter, one of the seasons I never saw while we lived in Florida, except for rare visits out of state. Every year, now that we’re north, I demand autumn and winter to be double what they are, twice as dense as a usual season, to undo sixteen years of their absence.
I now savor months without mosquitoes and other nuisance bugs, the break from most outdoor chores, the opportunity for snow (though we see relatively little of it here in Indy), the joys of “soup season”.
I love the quiet of winter—no dogs barking, no lawnmowers, very few people outside. The sky looks quiet, the half-sleeping sun peeking out from behind its soft, silver blanket now and then.
I’m susceptible to the so-called winter blues, too. When the days started getting noticeably shorter this year, I realized I was getting sadder on gray days and happier on sunny days.
I looked up reminders of what people do in Scandinavia, where the sun hardly rises at all in the winter, and found variations of these three things:
Get outside and, if possible, into nature. Even the tiny bit of cloud-diffused sun and the leafless deciduous trees make a huge difference in mood; this alone seemed to help my unexpected “dark days” sadness.
Be together with people. Spend deliberate time talking face-to-face with other humans in a meaningful way. The ordinary, like dinner with your family, counts. But it helps to find intentional time with other people.
Embrace the cozy indoor space. Make the most of the contrast between the cold outside and the cozy inside, with blankets, candles, soup, good socks, and other aspects of the Danish concept of “hygge”. This connects directly to point 2, as meaningful interaction with people you care about is part of hygge, not just soft blankets.
It takes a little time, a little re-framing, a little restructuring of a day. It takes communicating with other people; know that they also want to spend time with people. The effort is worth it; it all helps.
(If this fails, my other coping skill is to imagine that it’s dark outside my window because I’m in outer space and my house is the Starship Enterprise. Now I’m a Starfleet officer, boldly going where no one has gone before!)
More importantly, the dark and quiet of winter, which we feel most sharply after the string of busy holidays has passed, can direct us to the Light that never goes out—Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the One without whom no one will reach the Father.
“He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.” (Hebrews 1:3a, ESV)
We might let the dark remind us to say, “Yours is the day, yours also the night; you have established the heavenly lights and the sun. You have fixed all the boundaries of the earth; you have made summer and winter.” (Psalm 74:16-17)
And those of us who are believers in Him also carry the light, and we get to bring it to other people. It is perhaps dark and dreary and gray outside, but we have so much more than spring flowers and sunny days. We don’t “walk in darkness, but […] have the light of life” (John 8:12) even in the winter.
Writing Updates
Between my late letter last month and all our holiday travels, the only things I’ve written, besides this letter, are in my personal journal.
I’ve made small progress on my novel, and on my client’s book edits, in the last few weeks.
That’s it for this January! If any of this was valuable to you—interesting, useful, or beautiful—share it with someone:
To truth, love, and adventure,
Rae
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Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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