Large Fierce Mammal

The Winter King: Source http://browse.deviantart.com/?q=winter%20is%20coming&order=9&offset=48#/dqylud (Click to enlarge)

About 15 years ago, long before I ever heard of Game of Thrones and the Stark family motto, I was working late into the night alongside a leathercrafter of great skill who was kindly assisting me with a project that exceeded my own abilities and equipment to complete single handed. As we worked, our conversation revolved around our mutual love for natural materials – leather, bone, wood, natural fibres, stone, metals. The things our ancestors obtained and used in times when everything one needed to survive was subject to three simple rules that today we would call “terms of use” – If you didn’t have it, it broke, or wore out, you could make new, repair the old, or do without. Back when the world moved on muscle, wind, current, and tide, the seasons declared priorities, and all Nature’s creatures knew that time, effort, and resources were precious things that could only be squandered at your peril. Times when, as my talented friend pointed out, people worked like hell motivated by the overriding imperative that Winter was coming!

December is the month of the modern year when people in my part of the word routinely get caught up in the whirlwind of consumer frenzy generically referred to as “Christmas”. Held up as a time of joy and celebration, communion with family and friends, the giving and receiving of gifts, consideration for the less fortunate, and for the observance of religious ritual, the modern festivals are at once all of these things and none of them. With all their sparkle, clamour, and exhaustive demands, they represent but a shadow of the primal motivation the approach of the Winter Solstice held for those of our ancestors who lived under the looming spectre of Winter, taking of necessity a more pragmatic outlook on the end of one year and the uncertain opening to another.

Within all that, we all must find our Truth, and while I will not disrespect yours, dear reader, by laying claim to exclusivity on the moral high ground, I will assert that pepper spraying other shoppers to gain advantage at a pre-Christmas department store sale, or engaging in fisticuffs over the last Cabbage Patch Kid doll as I once personally witnessed, does not represent any form of “celebration” Mrs. LFM and I want anything to do with.

If you follow us here, you will be familiar with our annual Dark Sentiments series that runs every October with one article relevant to that important time of year published on each of its 31 days. This year, for the first time ever, we will be launching a new series titled A Long Winter’s Night that will begin on the 21st day of December and conclude on the 31st. While its revelries and revelations may bring joy to some, those will be people who adhere to an unorthodox form of joy.