This is the final installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s column Winter Solstice.

It’s dark. I am up early enough to see the stars. The porch light on the house across the street shines bright enough to bring shadows into the room. The neighborhood is still. The rattling newspaper delivery truck has not yet been by, the morning news not yet tossed on stoops. Frost not dew, the grass is stiff; a woman scrapes ice off her windshield and I feel it in my teeth. Mothwinged darkness opens itself widest now. Today is the shortest day of the year.

Wasn’t it just summer?

Or was summer a thousand years ago?

Was summer?

Now it’s now. Here we are. The Winter Solstice. The close of the year, the opening of a season—welcome, winter—the longest night, and light gets born again. Today is tied with its twin in the summer for the most powerful day of the year. Light a fire. Light a fire on this day. Let something burn. That is what the solstices are for. Summer flames say, Keep the light alive (it’s never worked, not once). In winter, a more urgent message: Bring light back to life (it’s worked every time so far).

The summer solstice scene is loose and dewy, flower-crowned crowds in debauch around the bonfires. People leaped over flames and the tongues of flame licked up high into the night. In winter: private fires. Home hearths. These fires “have such power over our memory that the ancient lives slumbering beyond our oldest recollections awaken with us …revealing the deepest regions of our secret souls,” writes Henri Bosco in Malicroix. The Yule log didn’t start as a cocoa confection with meringue mushrooms on the top. It was oak burned on the night of the solstice. Depending where one lived, the ashes of the solstice fire were then spread on fields over the following days to up the yield of next season’s crop, or fed to cattle to up fatness and fertility of the herd, or placed under beds to protect against thunder, or sometimes worn in a vial around the neck. The ancient cults cast shadows in our minds, shift and flicker, their fears are still our fears, down in the darkest places of ourselves.

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Nina MacLaughlin’s column, Winter Solstice, will have its final installment next Monday, December 21, on the solstice. 

Paul Cezanne, Leda and the Swan, c. 1882

The sledding hill in the town I grew up in was on the grounds of an institution for the criminally insane. Hospital Hill, we called it. Or Mental Mountain. It was a great place to sled.

A huge hill, a real wallomping mound of earth, a sledder’s heaven, there at the southern edge of the asylum, steep, long, with a stretch of flat at the bottom long enough that your ride could run its course without crashing into the barrier of brush and trees, or out into traffic on Route 27 beyond. At the top, asylum to our backs, we took our running starts then flung ourselves, belly flopping onto our inflated snow tubes, and whished down the hill. Or sometimes sitting upright on the tube, someone behind you, parent or pal, put their hands at your shoulder blades, started running, pushing, building speed, until gravity took over and the hill pulled faster than the push, and hands disappeared from your back, and you were released, hovering over the snow, cold air in your ears, tang of blood on the tongue from a chapped lip, mittens gripping the handles, the high-pitched purr of rubber on snow, snow that had been packed by ride after ride, it was you and the movement, and it never felt crazy to cry out, there by yourself, going faster and faster, in your own private moment of fear and glee. Is that what made the lunatics yell inside their white-walled cells? Some same combination of soaring down a mountainside unstoppable, I’m happy, I’m afraid, I feel too much, I have to let it out? So we surrender. “This is the Hour of Lead—” writes Emily Dickinson:

Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

The walk back up the hill took a while, we’d be panting, ready to shed a layer, and the brick buildings of the hospital loomed into view near the top, bars on all the windows. The hospital was closed in 2003, all the windows boarded up with wood painted red. I can feel right now the hands disappearing from my shoulder blades. And I can hear the sound of the alarm when someone escaped from the hospital. Not the blaring tin of a car alarm or wheeeuuuu whirl of an ambulance or clattering clang of grade school fire drill. More foghorn, deep, soul-stilling moan, as though the bulkhead door to the basement of Hell was being pried open again and again.

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Nina MacLaughlin’s newest column, Winter Solstice, will run for four weeks, finishing on the solstice on December 21. 

Vintage Krampus Postcards

December and Demeter is grieving again.

Hades cracked the earth and snatched her daughter Persephone, tugged her down to the underworld to be his unconsenting bride. In response, Demeter ceased growth. Wilt, starvation, cold. No warmth, no fruit, no fat goats whose throats to slit in sacrifice. So Zeus sent Hermes to the underworld to bring Persephone back. But Ascalaphus, Hades’s orchard minder, saw what Persephone had done, and told, rotten tattler. If you eat the food of the dead, you stay, and Persephone had swallowed six pomegranate seeds. The gardener held the fruit in his hand and the juice slipped down the private part of his wrist. Each seed, one month in Hades. She’s down there now. And we’re up here, buttoning our coats, eating carbohydrates, trying to remember to unclench our jaws.

There’s something seductive about the below, the magnetic tug of the dark. Aren’t you curious? To see how dark it gets, to see what’s down here, a little lower, a little deeper, something might get revealed, something singular, something special, I’m getting close to something true. It’s risky. I have a friend who likes to press a knife blade to his wrist. “It makes me shiver,” he says, “I feel it in all my tips.” I wouldn’t call him crazy. He’s interested in the edge. “The descent to the Underworld is easy,” Virgil cautions in The Aeneid. “Night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide, / but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air— / there the struggle, there the labor lies.” Sinking down is easy. But to return? No guarantees.

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Nina MacLaughlin’s newest column, Winter Solstice, will run for four weeks, finishing on the solstice on December 21.

Hilma Af Klint, The Swan (No 17), 1915-1914

Two boys strung the lights onto houses in Ohio. When nighttime arrived in the afternoon, they climbed their ladders. One held the loop and fed the cord to the other who reached and fastened, line of lights between them. This way they did their festive work, strung bulbs under gutters, rimmed front porches, edged the roofline trim—there they were at the peaks, making arrow-tips of light aimed at the big black night sky. They helixed little lights around lampposts, around and around the oak tree and the evergreen, passing the lights between them, breathing in pine needle, branches catching the collars of their coats, pitch sticky at the tips of their work gloves. Some bulbs were sharp and thorny, others round-fat egg drops. They looped the lights around the trees, lights dripped and draped as though the constellations themselves had gotten caught in the net of branches. When they finished the job, they’d knock on the door, bring the family out into the cold, ready?, and they’d flip the switch, ta-da!, and sometimes kids would leap and cheer and turn around at their parents smiling, eyes glittering, to see if they saw, too. And sometimes the parents made a sound, joy, relief, firework glow on their faces like summer. But it wasn’t summer, it was coming on Christmas, as Joni Mitchell sings, and the boys saw their breath as they worked, lighting up the darkness.

Last day of November and the dark this year is darker. We’re moving into winter. Henri Bosco describes the moment in his fevered novel Malicroix:

It was already the end of November … a time of extreme balance between the seasons, a miraculous moment when the world was poised on pure ridge. From there it seemed to cast a glance back at the aging autumn, still misty with its wild moods, to contemplate deadly winter from afar.

We’ll contemplate this deadly winter from right close up, we’re already almost in it.

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