Over at The Patient Gardener, Helen Johnstone talks about what this Christmas will mean to her:
I have left the artificial tree in the loft and instead we had the fun of going to choose a real Christmas tree [....] I have kept the decorations simple and traditional [....] Finally, I have used the branches cut off the bottom of the tree to make a wreath for the front door to which I have added foliage collected from around the garden which for me is a celebration of mid-winter and marks the turning of the year and days getting longer – as a gardener something I look forward to more than Christmas. Just these simple things have brought Christmas to life in our house far more than in previous years.
I think being outdoors so much means that gardeners—even if they don't always realise it explicitly—have access to something chthonic and deep. They can draw it up from the ebb and flow of the seasons, as one might do ground water from a well.
I've come to gardening via the seasons, so kind of the wrong way round compared to Helen. Gardening only really took up a place in my heart in the past couple of years, but I'd been a keen commuter-cyclist—in all weathers, on unlit country roads—for nearly eight years before then. The day lengths, the weathers and the seasons therefore seem to affect me more than they do most other people I know. I'm also far better at season-watching than I am at gardening, and can guess the time of day from the sun's position more accurately than I can prune a tree!
Twelve years ago, all within the same calendar year, my parents moved abroad, my grandmother died, and my wife (then still my new partner) lost her grandfather. When my parents invited the whole family to their new Spanish home for Christmas, it was a master-stroke. The crowd that eventually assembled included my grandad, my auntie and some of her family, and even my wife's parents, who had at that point never met my own. Mum and Dad neatly managed to prevent both sides of this nascent family from doing the "same old things" that would have just led to too much dwelling on what we'd lost; instead we could spend that time thinking about what we might gain in being together.
The predominance of festivals at this time of year means we can and ought to feel happy mixing and matching. Nowadays we all practice a kind of fusion winterval anyway: commercialism, secular affection, Christianity, Victorian chic, paganism, Saturnalia, Diwali, Eid, Imbolc, Thanksgiving.... And that's fine. That's how our culture works. There's an unexpected comfort to be found in shaking things up, as long as you do it gently, as you would a snow-globe.
Like our ancestors before us, let us make our own Christmas, our own Thanksgiving, our own Sol Invictus.
