Winter’s Promise By Jamie Kirkpatrick

A few days ago, we made it through the inky tunnel of the year’s longest night. Now, for some of us anyway, here comes the year’s holiest night. The common denominator is, of course, darkness and the return of light. Bleak winter’s promise.

I read somewhere that the winter solstice—the astrological moment when we turn our planetary face back toward the sun—is one of the oldest known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations may go back at least 30,000 years, even before humans began farming on a large scale. Many of the world’s most ancient structures—Stonehenge, for example—were designed to pinpoint the precise date of the solstice by using a circular arrangement of standing stones to catch the first rays of midwinter sun.

Some ancient people probably even believed that since daylight had been waning, it might go away forever. They built and lit huge bonfires to tempt the sun to return. The tradition of decorating our houses and trees with lights at this time of year are the descendants of those prehistoric bonfires. We are but links in a long human chain.

“In the Bleak Midwinter” was originally a poem penned by the English poet Christina Rossetti in 1872. It has been set to music many times. The most familiar version was published by Gustav Holst; the tune is called ‘Cranham’ and it was written as a congregational hymn in 1906. It was one of my dear father’s most cherished Christmas carols:

In the bleak midwinter

Frosty wind made moan

Earth stood hard as iron

Water like a stone

 

Today, climate change and global warming may be pushing winter ever farther north, but we still feel its chill in our bones. I suppose it’s even possible that we share some atavistic measure of our ancient human ancestors’ dread about the death of light. But I think it’s safe to say we’ve endured long enough to understand our place in the universe, and to have faith that light and the warmth of the sun will return soon.

Or will it?

Scientists predict that over the course of billions of years, the sun will either run out of hydrogen and swell into a red giant, swallowing its closest planets, or it will lose its outer layers and shrink into a white dwarf, a dead star that will slowly cool and fade away. Either way, Earth will die with it. Another poet, the American icon Robert Frost, contemplated that distant fate in “Fire and Ice.”

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

 

Am I worried about that distant demise? Not really. I figure that by then our planet’s goose will already be either cooked or frozen. Instead, I’ve decided to hold winter to its eternal promise. In the words of the Beatles:

Here comes the sun,

Here comes the sun

And I say, it’s all right.

I’ll be right back.

 

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. His new novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available on Amazon.