Wintering summary

There’s a Finnish word, talvitelat, that has no direct English translation, and refers to the preparations Finns make ahead of winter. Winter arrives hard and fast in Finland, and the season can be long and hard: it pays to be prepared. So Finns begin to ready themselves at the very first hint of frost. They store their summer clothes and unpack their sweater stash and snow boots. They chop and stack firewood. They buy winter tires for their cars and make sure the roofs of their houses are in good enough repair to withstand the weight of heavy snowfall.

Sometimes, these preparations can begin as early as August, when summer is in full swing.

For humans, the cold and the dark have become nuisances. We resist them with thermal clothes, indoor heating, electric lights, and glowing screens.

Animals like dormice, on the other hand, hibernate through the winter months in nests made from moss and bark. Other animals, like badgers and frogs, don’t hibernate for lengthy periods but reach a state of torpor on cold days, where they drop their body temperatures and slow their heart rates. 

In the secular, Western calendar, what milestones mark the year? Christmas, whether or not you celebrate the holiday’s religious aspects, is widely observed along with New Year’s Eve. Most people expect to take a week or two of summer vacation, too. And then? Well, that’s about it.

Compare this to the Druidic calendar, patterned after the Wheel of the Year. Every six weeks, druids observe a ritual connected with the passing of time and the season. Imbolc is observed at the start of February to mark the beginning of spring. It’s followed by Alban Eilir, the spring equinox, and Beltane, or May Day.

In popular culture, wolves are often associated with winter – and this association is far from positive. Think of literature. In C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, for example, wolves are the evil foot soldiers of the White Witch, whose sinister magic has left the land of Narnia frozen in permanent winter. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books open with the appearance of five dire wolf pups. As they grow, the pups become omens of an approaching, cataclysmic Winter which threatens to devastate the land.

In contemporary Europe, you’re far more likely to encounter a fictional wolf than a real one. But this wasn’t always the case.

Snow, while beautiful, is seen by many as an inconvenience. When it accumulates – a less and less frequent occurrence in many parts of the world – it crashes the whole system. In a world where almost everything can be seamlessly managed with the click of a mouse or the swipe of a card, it’s humbling to see how the weather can still bring us to a standstill.

Heavy snow can make roads impassable, stop trains in their tracks, and isolate villages from the outside world. But snow also beckons even serious adults to reconnect with a playful side of their nature – perhaps because it forces us to slow down and pay more attention to our surroundings. There’s something about snow that tempts even grown-ups to trace out a snow angel on the ground or make a dapper snowman.

In one of his famous fables, Aesop, the ancient Greek storyteller, recounts the tale of the ant and the grasshopper. The grasshopper enjoys the summer months and enjoys the lazy, sunny days. The ant, meanwhile, spends the summertime industriously gathering grains of wheat for winter.

When leaner months arrive, the grasshopper has nothing to eat. Desperate, the grasshopper asks the ant to share its harvest, but the ant scoffs: the grasshopper didn’t do enough work during the summer, so it doesn’t deserve to survive the winter.

After her study of winter in the natural world, and learning how various cultures and species have adapted to it, the author embraced a new approach to dealing with dark and challenging personal times.

In the wake of illness, career change, and family upheaval, she learned to apply the lessons of the season to her own life. In essence, she learned “wintering.”