Large Fierce Mammal

“Hunters in the Snow” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, oil on wood, 1565.

Winter, in latitudes where sub-freezing temperatures can occur, brings with it harsh realities that only frantic and organized preparation in the months prior can meet with any hope of success, leading to the passing down of parables such as the story of the ant and the grasshopper, and the legend of the Wendigo. This is not hard to grasp, but the significance of the winter solstice is so profound that it has not gone unnoticed even by the inhabitants of lands with much more benign climates, where the season doesn’t ride in sharing a horse with the Angel of Death. ~ A Long Winter’s Night – The Winter Solstice is the Reason for the Season

We have now reached that point in the year once known as “mid-winter” when people far less sophisticated than nowadays were in charge of naming things sensibly. You sophisticated moderns, don’t try this at home.

They called it that because harvest time at Summer’s end, evening breezes tinged with just a hint of colder than usual, leaves turned to colour and falling from trees, and days marked by an end to long twilights in favour of night’s rapid onset, declared agriculture a non-starter and was rightly considered the start of Winter in earnest. After the Winter Solstice, and even though the worst weather normally associated with Winter was still to come, the nights grew shorter, the days longer, and all signs pointing to an eventual Spring raised hope of a restart to the cycle of rinse and repeat. All you had to do was not die in the meantime.

This Long Winter’s Night, I suggest you enjoy Surviving Winter in the Middle Ages, produced by Medieval Madness. I offer this not as any suggestion that it represents a definitive treatment of the subject matter, but rather an introduction to the headlight of an oncoming freight train that you might want to meditate on if this isn’t to be considered nostalgia some day soon.