It’s that time of year now – winter is closing in if you live in the northern hemisphere, and even if you don’t, the holiday season around the globe is in full swing. For many, the onset of December is a stressful and even sad time. Whether it’s the gathering of the long dark, the dread of the coming and seemingly endless days of cold and grey and long, long nights, the stress of the holiday season itself (for so many different reasons), or some combination of all of the above, the magic of this month becomes lost entirely. Certainly, it’s easy to get lost in this train of thought as the darkest day of the year draws nigh, but for this witch, December is both powerful and beautiful.
One of my favourite things to do at the outset of December is to walk the beaches, be they sand or cobble. Few people venture to the water in the cold and dark, and if you bend your mind’s eye to it, you can see clearly the reclamation that happens every winter.
The animals that overwinter along New England’s coasts are burrowed in and snug under the sand, quiet, but present. Larger marine life has generally gone on to warmer waters – especially whales, who calve in the warm southern waters over winter. Though rarely seen from shore, their absence is keenly felt on the windswept beaches. Everything is settling into rest.
The coastal forests I love so much are similarly quiet. Birds and beasts alike have gone into some form of migration or hibernation. Insects – fireflies and pollinators especially – are snug in their beds of leaf litter, keeping warm over winter until they can hatch or emerge in the spring.
Just as we need to rest, so do the earth and the sea.
But what we tend to gloss over, even as we celebrate it, is the fact that the winter solstice is the last of the longest dark. The longest night of the year gives way to a minute more of light each day. What’s one minute more, you might ask? It’s still bloody dark for too long. One minute seems like nothing in the grand scheme of things, but how many times have you found yourself missing, say, the subway train when you’re already running late? That one minute was the difference between you getting somewhere on time or having to wait another five or ten minutes on a crowded platform. How many of us have longed to have just one minute more with someone we loved, or spent one minute longer in a place we love? That one minute in those terms is, in fact, a tremendous thing.
For this witch, the magic of December isn’t in the holiday revelry, or the modern celebrations loosely based now on ancient festivities that remind the sun it’s time to come back again, but in the differences the tiny things make. One minute more of light per day once the solstice has passed. One more firefly able to hatch from their undisturbed rest. More time spent with those we care about, and more time spent within, making the most of the dark and the cold. We are not bound to be somewhere. The social season comes to a close, and it’s in this time we can feel deeply into the earth and waters around us, refine and hone our magic, truly slow down and fully realise what it means to hear the hush of the snow as it falls on the water.
Now is the time to celebrate the things we think of as inconsequential, one minute at a time and that, my friends, is the truest magic of December there is.
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