Winter Solstice

...Perhaps a little later we shall go to church...

...beyond that point I emerge into a realm of force that is beyond my understanding...

...Or so it seems...

...For a season or two the foxes and the rabbits overran the hills...

...There is, true, a kind of balance that persists...

...That is not all...

...By stretching the definition a little, we begin them with at least a token day of Thanksgiving...

...Thus the ancient reverence for the green bough, which in due and Christian time and evolution became a symbol of spiritual life everlasting...

...The old song book with the carols and Christmas hymns was brought out and put on the piano, and even the constant abrasion of the radio and the bray of the loud speakers of commerce could not wear away their appeal to the heart, the emotions and the memories, not when the old songs were played and sung here at home...

...Thanksgiving, and the end of the collegiate football season, officially at least, mark late November...

...But as often as not we get in the car and tour the countryside and the village to see the lights and decorations and thus to feel the kinship with millions of others on this Christian holiday eve...

...New Year's or Twelfth Night was the time for such doings, and even then the giving and the merrymaking were restrained, both by conviction and by material circumstance...

...Most of the traditional trappings, or decorations, are symbolic, with meanings which transcend even the Christian faith...

...Or perhaps I might better say it is man's nature to number his own days, though that is certainly not his public purpose, since relatively few of us are actuaries...

...Nor have I searched for rhythms beyond those of the sunspots, universal rhythms, perhaps...

...Only those who have alienated themselves from prime forces could plausibly argue against this radical attitude—and I use the term "radical" in the strict sense, meaning something rooted in the elemental, the ultimate force...

...Change is a law of life...

...By a combination of chance and choice this day, the Christmas of the Christian world, coincides closely with the change of the season, the turn to both Winter cold and lengthening daylight which inclines toward Spring and natural resurrection...

...We set the tree beside a window looking out on the road, that others might share its beauty, and we festooned it with fragile balls and strings of lights...

...For instance, we here in our Valley go into the woods and gather our own Christmas greens...

...retrospect and appraisal and new resolution...

...Borland lives in the Connecticut Berkshires...

...Then we can settle down to Winter, which in our area will by then have settled down to business...

...For instance, there was a time within easy memory when foxes were so numerous here that they almost eliminated the rabbits and the grouse, not to mention the farmers' flocks of chickens...

...In their extremity, they turned to their forests, to the evergreen of hope and enduring life...

...to the credit of the race...

...The pines on the mountain will be draped with snow and icicles, and there will be drifts along the fence lines with such a graceful flow of curve as no artist ever achieved...

...I have only to look to my own valley to know that...

...So it is to man's honor, even to the credit of the race, as I have said, that the year brings The Holidays...

...Let there be light...

...This, of course, may sound like the crotchety complaint of a back-country character who insists that change and evil are perfect synonyms...

...For a number of years there was carol singing in front of the church in the village, and we usually went, not so much to add our voices as to feel the pulse of the common heart, to be a part of the simple celebration...

...The red berries add the festive note...

...When the foxes diminished in numbers, the rabbits and grouse came back, increased tremendously...

...And always we pause before coming back indoors, pause and look up at the stars, to know that though we are earthlings we are of a universe...

...To our own honor, I must add...

...That is the real meaning of the holiday season, the faith, the truth, the Beyond and the Forever, which are sensed in the smell of the evergreen boughs, in the twinkle of the festive lights, in the human contact renewed in greetings and gifts...

...This, of course, is written before Christmas Day, but I know what will be happening, since we have our own traditions...

...This year, as always, we brought in ground pine and ground cedar and hemlock, boughs and a small white pine for the tree...

...And the next day is Christmas...

...So we gathered the greens and brought them in, with a handful of partridge berry and a few branches of black alder with its brilliant red-orange berries...

...We can never recover that time—indeed, much of it we wouldn't want—but we do cherish some of the trappings and much of the deeper sentiment surrounding it...

...So it is fortunate that in our way of life we have conceived that season which we casually call The Holidays...

...Thus the Christmas greens, the Christmas tree...

...For a little time, which seems to lessen year by year, somehow, we pause briefly to cherish traditions of faith...

...Then, in some mysterious manner no doubt related to overcrowding, the foxes were stricken with mange and rabies and other diseases...

...And some time during the day there will be a walk on the mountain with the dog, to look out over a world in its own holiday dress, particularly if there has been a snowfall and if there is enough sun to clarify the air...

...Now we occasionally go to the more formal service, inside the church...

...The river no doubt will be frozen over...

...Then they settled down to Fall itself, to diminishing daylight and deepening cold, and awaited the Winter solstice...

...The Holidays will be at an end for another round of the sun...

...Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands...

...For the Holidays, as we speak of them, capitalizing and granting to them enduring importance and significance, are essentially symbolic of our better hopes and higher aspirations...

...Luke, the King James version, with its wonderful language and its majestic sonority...

...The fox population waned and the rabbit population waxed...

...All of them somehow linked to natural phenomena, to a recognizable if not always recognized rhythm...

...But times have changed...

...We progress to the nadir of the natural year, the Winter solstice, and we soon after engage in a festival of light and color and gift and religious ceremony to commemorate The Birth...

...Soon after the solstice came Christmas which, according to differing creeds, was just another day or was occasion for religious ceremony, and certainly was no time for secular display of gifts or ostentatious merrymaking...

...I have not followed this matter far enough to say whether the recurrence of insect onsets in force, or the probably cyclic movement of glaciers and even of rainfall and drought, fits into the same broad pattern...

...There are men who collect statistics on such matters all over the world...

...Another sleep and another awakening and someone shouts, "Happy New Year...

...We fashioned a wreath and hung it on the door, the evergreen circle of life and continuity...

...Probably, though we make no fetish of the practice, we shall read aloud from the second chapter of St...

...their red also stands, in ancient ritual, for the blood of life as well as for celebration...

...In a sense, that is the reason for the calendar, which marks off the days in mathematical precision...

...For during my own relatively brief tenancy here there has been constant change, and I know that when I am gone that change will continue at its own pace...

...Then they, too, were stricken with various diseases...

...The pastures will be covered with snow, in which is always written a record of wild life that surprises me with its abundance, year after year...

...Copyright © 1957 by Hal Borland...

...I see no heed to labor that point, however, since man too often shows his persistent inability to learn from his own kind's experience, let alone from the example of lesser creatures...

...With prayer and incantation, they lifted high the green boughs, and the sun passed its equinoctial low and its shadow shifted slightly...

...The year-end is the time when we are inclined to search for such a comfortable place, a place where we can declare with certainty that the past means thus and so and that the future will follow a predictable pattern...

...His inclination is toward excuse rather than apology, and his impulse is toward power and aggrandizement...

...We decked the hall, as the old carol phrases it...

...Out of such material has come the knowledge that there is an apparent rhythm, in fact a complex system of rhythms, into which our local fox-rabbit rise and fall fits with disturbing, or satisfying, approximation—disturbing or satisfying, depending on the viewpoint...

...life itself is change...

...He learns slowly, and only from time to time does he pause in his reaching for the moon—for any moon, includ-various sputniks—to heed the lessons of the foxes and the rabbits, of the lemmings and the spawning salmon...

...Again the foxes ate themselves out of natural food, and again they were stricken by some vulpine plague...

...Nowadays we time Thanksgiving by the calendar, not the harvest—on occasion we have even timed it by the retailers' commercial yearnings...

...And probably too much money and too little love spent on gifts...

...Christmas Day is, I am quite sure, too much feasting for the good of the body and too little praying for the good of the soul...

...A word spoken in due season, how good it is...

...On Christmas Eve the fire will burn bright, more for cheer than for warmth regardless of the weather...

...They held their Thanksgiving earlier in the Fall, when the crops were newly garnered, when their thanks were heartfelt for tangible evidence of their own industry and the favor of Providence...

...It doesn't happen to be that, however...

...So do squirrels...

...Even in the perennial and hopeless effort to reach a summing up of purpose or design...

...We went over the daily delivery of Christmas cards and greetings, tokens of friendship and remembrance...

...we know that it is still there...

...And that is obviously impossible, since there is no final sum, no place where life and change stand still...

...The explanation would seem to be relatively simple, and it might seem to have lessons that wise human beings should take to heart...

...There may be a fleeting thought that those gifts represent, in a way, myrrh and incense and other precious offerings to the child born in a stable and cradled in a manger...

...Some things we are inclined to take on faith...

...Or if there is a slow snowfall coming down...

...I have found it impossible to live in contact with natural forces and deny that change is inevitable...

...Some time during that period—it usually happens on or near New Year's—I shall wish it were possible to draw a line and achieve a total representing the days and weeks and years up till now...

...And there will be feasting, with a special treat for Pat, the dog, and an extra handful of sunflower seeds for the chickadees...

...of peepers in the lowland, and the fresh smell of Spring plowing...

...To feel a proper pride and a proper humility...

...and there was light...

...As the sun seemed to travel farther and farther southward they faced the terrifying possibility of progressive and unremitting night with cold that would steadily deepen into glacial eternity...

...The essential is green, living green, and the reason lies far back in man's time, when the North Europeans in their dark forests feared the Winter solstice...

...The crisis was past for another year...

...that makes the woods irresistible on a Christmas Day...

...In a few years the foxes were decimated, done in by some natural cause...

...For a little while we all come in contact with it...

...I can go so far, and no farther, in explaining it...

...As I was saying, there is no place where we can draw a line and declare that here we can cast up a total, a summing-up...

...But there is a factor beyond the obvious one in the rise and fall of our local foxes and rabbits...

...We turn around twice, take three long breaths, and we hastily note that the shortest day of the year has passed...

...These animal rhythms coincide to a remarkable degree with the rhythm of sun-spot frequency...

...The trappings are important...

...There are other men who collate those statistics...

...It is in the nature of man to count, to tally up, to hope for some ultimate significance in such totals...

...Somewhere in the midst of the trappings, the obscurely meaningful decorations and ornamentation of the festivals, lies that kernel of truth and belief without which life swiftly approaches sterility...

...There is the succession: thanks for natural bounty and the fruit of human industry...

...But there was a simpler time and a life of slower tempo, and this is the season when we are all reminded of it, or should be...

...And so do the Atlantic salmon, and, to a degree, the salmon of the Pacific...

...And after that comes the January thaw, the first crocus, the shrill HAL BORLAND, who writes the editorials on nature for the New York Times, is the author of "High, Wide and Lonesome," "This Hill, This Valley," and "An American Year...

...And within a week after Christmas comes the New Year of the calendar, an artificial decimal point in time, when we are inclined to indulge in summarizing and good intending...

...So do Arctic hares and Arctic foxes...

...Black alder is our northern ilex, our regional type of holly...

...But, as I say, I wish it were possible to draw a total line and say, "This is the sum, this is the substance...

...Simultaneously, the foxes began to appear once more in numbers...

...Lemmings follow a similar pattern...

...A week later there will be New Year's Day...

...Mankind is not by nature endowed with conspicuous humility...

...Breakfast will be eaten from plates in the living room while we open the gift packages...

...Not even a Toynbee can say with certitude that the happenings of the past, repetitious though they seem to be, will inevitably recur in the future or that the sum of the past can be stated unequivocally...

...and I use that term not in disparagement but as representing outward ornament and decoration...

...belief in the birth of hope and aspiration, in the bases of religious faith...