Bestselling Author of Wintering Katherine May Reflects on the Healing Beauty of This Season

Three o’clock on 21st December finds me haring around the house in a kind of panic. Sunset is a time-critical event. It cannot be negotiated or delayed. It does not care that this is a busy time of year, an impossible one, full of noisy demands. The sun will set exactly on time, which, according to the weather app on my phone, is 3:50 pm. That is just shy of eight hours after it rose this morning. No wonder the days feel so dark.

I have been rushing like this for a while now. I don’t know exactly when it began, and I never meant for it to begin at all, but there it is, every year, that slow build of intensity in the run-up to Christmas. There are the presents to be bought, the plans to be made, the cards to be written and sent (or, in my case, to be bought, fretted over, and then left in their packages). There is the food to be prepared early and laid down, a list that grows longer every year: chutneys and pickles in the autumn, a Christmas cake and pudding, biscotti, Swiss leckerli, damson gin. There are the people who drop by with unexpected gifts that send you into a scramble to reciprocate. It all begins to feel a lot like hard work.

I rush through Whitstable’s narrow Victorian streets towards the sea. My breath is high in my chest. Is this worth it, this extra layer of hurry and stress on top of so many others? I lift my basket in front of me to squeeze down an alleyway, and then another, and then I climb over the sea-wall and I am here, finally, on the beach. The sun is low already and I am not sure if there is time for the fire to catch before the light disappears entirely.

I make a circle of logs below the tideline, fill it with balled-up newspaper and kindling sticks, and then strike a match and watch the flame catch, and spread, and grow, encouraged by the soft breeze that is coming in from the sea. I balance another log on top, and now friends are arriving, crunching down the beach towards me, carrying folding chairs and flasks, tupperwares and blankets. The sun is just inches away from the horizon. We send the children off to find extra wood on the shore, and I pour everyone a drink in my tin cups, and I notice that the fire has really taken this year. It is roaring orange against the pale sand.

I straighten up, sip my drink and make the kind of involuntary exhale that comes when you finally relax despite yourself, because everything is just as it should be, just as it always has been.

*

The winter solstice is often seen as the pivot on which the year rotates, the shortest day followed by the longest night, after which the days grow longer again. Except that’s not quite correct. The solstice is better understood as a pause at the darkest part of the year. Our ancestors, who lived in the absence of clock time, observed that the sun stood still in the sky for several days, rising and setting at its southernmost position. This original meaning is revealed in the Latin etymology of the word solstice: sol stit. The sun has stopped. It has ceased its wandering across the sky.

The sun stands still at the height of summer’s fever, and in the unnerving depths of winter’s dark, and we know that those moments have always felt significant. Across the ancient world, temples, cities and stone formations aligned with the solstices, although their exact meanings have been lost to time. I have heard it said that the old rites of midwinter were an attempt to restart the sun again, to push it back into motion like a stalled car. Perhaps, but I doubt there was ever a moment when humans didn’t know that the sun would recommence its travels. The knowledge has always been continuous, passed between us, intrinsic to our humanity. We know that midwinter will pass. We know that it is, in fact, fleeting. But each year, we must battle with the irrational part of ourselves that tells us that it is not.

The Christmas season is now associated with rush and exhaustion, with sloth and boredom, with a restless, purposeless kind of stasis, and a driving pressure to produce and to buy. It appears to be an absurd amount of effort just for one, single day, but we do it anyway, bickering as we go. It is possible, I think, to change this, to restore our connection to the pause in the year, and to learn to embark on the journey it offers to us. To do this, we need to return to an older understanding of this moment—the long midwinter. We know it from the northern European Yule, from the Slavic days of Koliada, from the Twelve Days of Christmas, not one. It is not a build-up to a single day followed by a season of atonement, but instead a time between times, this season within a season. Midwinter is a process not an event; it is a lived experience. When we make space for it, we allow ourselves to be changed.

We can learn to fill the long solstice with an array of beautiful things: with many gentle feasts instead of a single overwhelming one, with family gatherings and sparkling parties, with gifts exchanged and songs sung. But it’s also a place for the quiet to rise up in us, a moment for solitude and contemplation, for long walks in the cold air and time spent burrowing through books and writing in journals. In the Celtic tradition, these are the ‘omen days’— a time for divining the year to come.  There is a merging that happens in all that darkness, a connection made between ourselves and the night, a place where dreams seep into our waking.

The sun stops to make time for us to connect again with the people we love, to mull over the old year and to imagine the new. In the ten days between the solstice and new year, we can allow midwinter to inhabit us. When the days get lighter again, we will be changed.

*

The sun touches the horizon, and the black-headed gulls hurl themselves into the air, shrieking against the impending darkness. We say that we are glad to be here again, that we have looked forward to this, to the peace it brings. It has landed without me noticing, that contented sense that this is exactly the right thing to be doing in this moment, that there’s no better place to be. There is nothing here, really: a fire, some chatter, a cold beach and a sun that is visibly inching downwards, a red sliver that sinks and sinks until there is nothing but the glow of it in the shaded sky.

"I think that’s it," I say. "We have turned the year!" It’s a phrase I learned a few years ago, when I celebrated the solstice at Stonehenge, and I love the way it suggests that it was our work, rather than the sun’s. We clang our cups together, and call the children back so we can hug them. The fire looks a little brighter. Now that the sun has gone, it feels as though we have captured it here on the beach, blazing at our feet.

This is the seeding of a space that will expand and take on its own  life over the next dozen days. It will have a quality all of its own, this place where we gather to live out the time of stasis, when our world collapses in on itself for a while, and all the rules are suspended. It is a place in which I know I’ll find peace.

Katherine May is an internationally bestselling author and podcaster living in Whitstable, UK. She is the author of the hybrid memoir Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, as well as The Electricity of Every Living Thing, her memoir of a midlife autism diagnosis, and other works. Her writing has appeared in a range of publications including The New York Times and Aeon. May hosts the podcast, The Wintering Sessions. Her next book, Enchantment, will be published in 2023.

Question from the Editor: How do you foresee yourself embracing the long solstice? We'd love to know in the comments below!