Winter Slumber

Poor old winter gets a bad rap. No-one likes it. When you look at the mythology and symbolism surrounding the cold season, it’s all doom and gloom, death and despair. And that’s really not fair.

In Greek mythology, it’s Demeter who, mother of Persephone who gets dragged off to hell for six months of the year, gets depressed over her daughter’s absence and thereby causes winter. On the other hand, for the warlike Welsh, two rival warriors of the Otherworld duel over the love of a beautiful maiden, symbolising a contest between summer and winter.

Numerous writers, such as CS Lewis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, use winter to symbolise a lack of hope – in Narnia, it is always winter, but never Christmas. Other literary allusions include bleakness, isolation, regret and, the ultimate, death. Equally, spring could be likened to painful, bloody birth pangs rather than pretty birds twittering sweetly in the cherry blossom, and little bunnikins hopping about in the meadows.

But, to be literal, rather than literary, it is not the end: winter is the season when the earth rests from all her labours leading up to the harvest. There is something beautiful about the notion of the trees dropping all their leaves and slumbering peacefully, before the almighty effort of pushing out all those little green buds when spring comes.

The prettiest analogy I can think of is the caterpillar that builds its cocoon and waits all winter long for the warmth of the sun – and you know what happens next.