I love winter. Adore it, down into its very depths. East Scotland, where I live, has had a run of quite spectacular autumns and early winters in recent years: months of bright, frosted sunshine; blinking seals on rocks, as the light ebbs away like a fading photograph. And this time of year, it feels like it is never not dark. The children go to school under Mordor-like shadowed crags; a thick cloak of blackness surrounds clutches of gleefully chattering yellow brownies and intrepid paper boys carrying their bike lights.
Scottish children don’t really get that excited page in The Tiger Who Came to Tea when the little girl gets to go out after dark. Going out is going out after dark.
And up until … ooooh approximately two weeks from now, it’s nothing but delightful. There’s Halloween, fireworks, and, the daddy of them all: Christmas. Everything is joy – tinsel and lights and fun and baking cakes and new scarves and treats. Culturally we are brilliantly armed to cope with the downswing, all the way to 21 December, Midwinter’s Day, with its Dark Is Rising read-alongs (“This night will be bad … and tomorrow will be beyond imagining”), and that wonderful downing-of-tools feel about it all (except of course for many Scottish children, whose first day off school is 25 December).
This is the peak – or the trough, rather – of loveliness; winter’s darkest, most lulling spell. No wonder the new Christians pounced on the ancient midwinter festivals; it was a magnificent feat of rebranding.
But it’s downhill from here. It seems so odd, when the pendulum of the year swings, that that’s when it starts to get harder. Why are all the festivals stuck back in the nice bit, when you still have a memory of your summer tan? Although Burns Night is brilliant, it’s practically a feast of desperation by the time you’ve crawled your way through endless January (dry January, if you’re being particularly harsh on yourself). Valentine’s Day is absolute rubbish. I bet even Amal Clooney hates it.
The problem is, when it’s getting lighter every day, you feel you should be getting cheerier and lighter in tandem. But you aren’t. Not now, not for months. (My happy chilly November days were slightly tainted by listening repeatedly to Karine Polwart’s masterpiece of an album, A Pocket of Wind Resistance, with its line: “It was a freezing evening at the end of March.”)
Every day from now on there will be a little more light to taunt you that the gentler times are still miles off. October to December is the perfect time for settling in and cuddling up. January to March feels like a grim endurance test, with only the faintest dreams of bluebells to sustain you.
People taking their holidays in August is an utter mystery to me. Britain is often glorious in August; Edinburgh the best place on earth. No, February, that’s when you need it most, when you bodily crave a bit of sunshine. We always save up for then, find somewhere, just to let the light hit the back of your neck, warm your back, let you take off your jumper. Sit outside.
So enjoy these days. Curl up with a book and a candle and a glass of something you like and revel in the glorious dark depths of December – so beautiful, black and utterly without expectation. Those grey dashed hopes of spring will be with us soon enough.
• Jenny Colgan is a novelist and freelance journalist
