Christmas Eve
It's a quiet evening here at We Are One Farm, hovering around freezing outside and a fire has just been lit in the wood stove to take the chill off although it has been a mild day. Rain this morning and temperatures around 11 celsius took away a great deal of snow that had blanketed the land but we still have a good covering and some ice still in the driveway. Some of the larger lavender plants have been uncovered so if another snowfall doesn't come soon we may be mulching with straw after all. We have thirty bales set aside and were waiting for the ground to freeze, expecting it to be sometime around January like last year, when we had our first dumping of snow in November around Remembrance Day and we have been covered ever since.
Winter came long before the Solstice this year but I am starting to embrace it like never before. I dislike winter sports and being cold but with my new Sorel felt-lined boots and some manly mitts I am prepared this year to embrace winter, indoors and out. Perhaps it was the intensity of the summer's projects that has me looking forward to winter this year. As a steward of our land all spring, summer and fall, engaged with the plants and animals, I am wanting to continue our relationship in whatever way I can as winter passes. I am hoping to be newly inspired to photograph the winter and immerse myself in it as I did in the summer garden this year.
I am already enjoying the changing landscape as the snow comes and goes, changes form from blowing, fluffy flakes filtering the views like a greyed snowglobe, to a crisp, smooth sheet on the ground, pristine and sparkling, demanding sunglasses for daytime and bouncing the light of last night's full moon around, spotlighting the euonymous shrubs for the deer mother and baby to chew on in the middle of the night.
I am delighting in the changing parade of birds, the redpolls I have noticed for the first time at the feeders and the rosy pine grosbeaks seen for the first time in the crabapple, just part of a succession of fruit eaters like the cedar waxwings and evening grosbeaks who have been providing the outdoor decoration of the trees for the past few weeks.
We cut our solstice tree in the woods, not far from the formerly modest pond that the resident beavers have overflowed and commanded as their own rural development. They have left two barricades across the road before the pond, 20-30 foot trees, each at least 8" in diameter, felled and stripped of small limbs. We walked across the ice to their white-covered lodge, following the deer tracks which led us to the top to the holes in the snow that vent their warm breath. How to live compatibly with these ingenious little critters is something to ponder for the winter as they gather strength to mow down more trees, flood more acres of the woods and keep the back of our property inaccessible due to their 100-foot-long dam.
And I am looking forward to the winter as a time for rest and introspection, reading and pondering, the time to reflect on what we have accomplished in the past year and incubate plans for the next season. Physically it is a time for enjoying the cosiness of the fire, shorter days and the appetite for different foods.
Speaking of different foods, the tourtiere has just come out of the oven, Mme. Jehane Benoit's recipe as scribbled by my mother who made it for Christmas Eves of the past, a nod to our Quebec upbringing and my father's Quebec heritage although we were/are Anglophones. Tourtiere and the almond cake recipe are one way of keeping my mother and family in my heart when some have passed on and others are at a distance.
That's what Christmas is all about Charlie Brown....isn't it? While the traditions of Christmases past still call to me with a longing for the familiar, the family, the need for connection to my tribe of origin, I am indeed a neo pagan I guess. Tonight, and on the Solstice of the past week I am celebrating more my connection with nature, living in the country closer to the land that I ever have, and celebrating the changing of seasons, light, weather and wildlife and the seasons of the psyche as our time of activity, growth and harvest turn to the time of introspection, hibernation, incubation to prepare for the next cycle.
The light is returning, in the daylight lengthening, in the awareness growing. It is a time whether Christian or pagan or otherwise to celebrate, at least here in the northern hemisphere, the opportunity to rest and renew, to celebrate the opportunity every day to create anew, and welcome the light that shines both without and within each of us.
Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas or whatever tradition helps your own light shine.
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