What to say on the week of Christmas, as snow covers the tundra of our back yard? A deep freeze holds the Midwest in a stagnation of time and animation. As if everything is paused. And with that stillness comes a certain peace. Like nothing might move forward, like Christmas might not come this week and maybe this baby won’t be born until the ground thaws and life picks up again. I can almost hear the perfect quiet that makes us all hold still. Even though life will be bustling when the sun comes up; many will finish Christmas shopping, buy groceries for upcoming family meals, finish decorating, watch Christmas movies and drink eggnog flavored lattes, if I just stay inside, looking out over the thickly frozen lake where only the occasional ice skater slides by to remind me I am not in total isolated seclusion, I can trick myself into believing that there is no chaos in the world; that “the holidays” are an illusion. We really are just in the peace of deep winter.
I wonder on these quiet, frozen, dark days if we were actually meant to hibernate. Did we evolve too fast like we did with the whole walking upright thing causing almost the whole human race to suffer chronic back pain at some point in their lives? Were we also meant to chub-up and sleep through these cold, dark days? Is that why we Midwesterners often get a little blue as the days get so short that the sun is never directly above our heads? Is that why we often chub-up in winter time anyway? Perhaps this is how the Christmas cookie tradition got started: we just knew we needed extra fat so we invented the Santa story. “Oh and by the way he loves sugar cookies.”
Most of Minnesota winter seems too cold and dark to properly function in. There aren’t enough sweaters in the world to make twenty below seem acceptable. And even though today is the shortest day of the year and the sun will slowly, so slowly, start to grace us with his shining face in increasingly long intervals, we in the northern states are still in for the coldest and snowiest of an inflated winter.
But I don’t mind. Not now. Ask me again in two months when there is no end to winter in sight, but for now, the notion of hibernating in cold and quiet with a new baby sounds like just what I should be doing here in the tundra of Minnesota.
I wonder on these quiet, frozen, dark days if we were actually meant to hibernate. Did we evolve too fast like we did with the whole walking upright thing causing almost the whole human race to suffer chronic back pain at some point in their lives? Were we also meant to chub-up and sleep through these cold, dark days? Is that why we Midwesterners often get a little blue as the days get so short that the sun is never directly above our heads? Is that why we often chub-up in winter time anyway? Perhaps this is how the Christmas cookie tradition got started: we just knew we needed extra fat so we invented the Santa story. “Oh and by the way he loves sugar cookies.”
Most of Minnesota winter seems too cold and dark to properly function in. There aren’t enough sweaters in the world to make twenty below seem acceptable. And even though today is the shortest day of the year and the sun will slowly, so slowly, start to grace us with his shining face in increasingly long intervals, we in the northern states are still in for the coldest and snowiest of an inflated winter.
But I don’t mind. Not now. Ask me again in two months when there is no end to winter in sight, but for now, the notion of hibernating in cold and quiet with a new baby sounds like just what I should be doing here in the tundra of Minnesota.
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