From feasting to fortitude: The spiritual reckoning in the winter after Christmas

“ But Christmas is not only the mile-mark of another year, moving us to thoughts of self-examination: it is a season, from all its associations, whether domestic or religious, suggesting thoughts of joy. A man dissatisfied with his endeavours is a man tempted to sadness. And in the midst of the winter, when his life runs lowest and he is reminded of the empty chairs of his beloved, it is well he should be condemned to this fashion of the smiling face. Noble disappointment, noble self-denial are not to be admired, not even to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness. ”

“ It is, indeed, the season of regenerated feeling—the season for kindling, not merely the fire of hospitality in the hall, but the genial flame of charity in the heart. ”

“ Christmas Eve—'whose red signal fires shall glow through gloom and darkness till all the years be done'—the season of plum-pudding and holly, mistletoe and carolling, and of kind-hearted generosity, when the traditional stocking is filled, and the green branches of the festive tree are loaded with every species of 'goodies,' for excited and expectant little folks; and 'once a year,' the eve that, of all others, makes the place of those whom death has taken seem doubly vacant, and when the baby that came since last Christmas is hailed with a new joy ”

“ In those few dark days of inactivity, between a fete and the resumption of the implacable daily round, when the weather is usually cynical, and we are paying in our tissues the fair price of excess, we see life and the world in a grey and sinister light, which we imagine to be the only true light. Take the case of the average successful man of thirty-five. What is he thinking as he lounges about on the day after Christmas? ”

“ Because the fruits of the earth are already ripe, we are not to suppose there is no fruit left for winter to ripen. . . . Then is the great harvest of the year, the harvest of thought. All previous harvests are stubble to this, mere fodder and green crop. Our oil is winter-strained. Now we burn with a purer flame like the stars.—Shall we take refuge in cities in November? Shall the nut fall green from the tree? ”

“ Thought that was frozen up under stern experience gushes forth in feeling and expression, This is a freshet which carries away dams of accumulated ice. Our thoughts hide unexpressed like the buds under the downy or resinous scales. They would hardly keep a partridge from starving. If you would know what are my winter thoughts look in the partridge's crop. They are like the laurel buds, some leaf, some blossom buds, which, though food for such indigenous creatures, will not expand into leaves and flowers until summer comes. ”

“ To all these in the towns Christmas Week came. And of them all not many stood silent and looked Christmas Week in the face. Yet it is a human experience that none is meant to die without sharing. For the season is the symbol of what happens to folk if they claim it.
Christmas is the time of withdrawal of most144 material life. It is the time when nature subtracts the externals, hides from man the phenomena of even her evident processes. Left alone, his thought turns inward and outward—which is to say, it lays hold upon the flowing force so slightly externalized in himself. ”

“ The soul, too, has its own hours of Winter and Spring. Gethsemane and Calvary may come to us in the time of roses and Easter rise upon us in a December night. How shall we know, in our own agony, of another's gladness, or, on that blessed to-morrow when the struggle is over, help someone else to bear our own forgotten pain? ”

“ As the winter plunges still deeper the roots of the trees in the earth, so the wintry state of the soul plunges it deeper in humiliation. Remember the confidence of Job, "Although he slay me, I will trust in him." Although stripped of all consolation, and left in the desolation of nothingness, you may yet rejoice in God—out of, and separate from, self. Let the earth be stripped of her foliage; let neither flowers nor fruit appear; yet God is, therefore you may be happy. The mother loves to sacrifice herself for her child, and finds her life in what affords it happiness ”

“ The winter of our outward life—trials, crosses, sickness and death are all the wages of sin; and it is among these things that grace first strikes its roots. And what is the continual presence of sin in the soul but the true winter of the soul, amid which the grace that is planted in an outbreak of winter ever after strikes deeper root and grows? Once let a man be awakened of God to his own great sinfulness; and that not to its fruits in outward sorrow, but to its malignant roots that are twisted round and round and through and p. ”

“ The lesson of Scott's Journal is the most important lesson that experience can teach. It is taught in two words: honour and duty. Nothing is more obvious, from the nature and environment and the consequent condition of the human race, than the fact that this world is not, and was not intended to be, a place of settled happiness. All human beings have troubles, and as the years pass away those troubles become more numerous, more heavy, and more hard to bear. The ordeal through which humanity is passing is an ordeal of discipline for spiritual development. ”

“ O tidings of comfort and joy!
For Jesus Christ, our Saviour,
Was born on Christmas Day.
OLD CHRISTMAS RETURNED
All you that to feasting and mirth are inclined,
Come here is good news for to pleasure your mind,
Old Christmas is come for to keep open house,
He scorns to be guilty of starving a mouse:
Then come, boys, and welcome for diet the chief,
Plum-pudding, goose, capon, minced pies, and roast beef.
The holly and ivy about the walls wind
And show that we ought to our neighbors be kind,
Inviting each other for pastime and sport,
And where we best fare, there we most do resort ”

“ After the dinner-table was removed, the hall was given up to the younger members of the family, who made its old walls ring with their merriment, as they played at romping games. Master Simon, who was the leader of their revels, and seemed on all occasions to fulfil the office of that ancient potentate, the Lord of Misrule, was blinded in the midst of the hall. The little beings were as busy about him as the mock fairies about Falstaff ”

“ Each room with ivy leaves is drest,
And every post with holly.
Though some churls at our mirth repine,
Round your foreheads garlands twine;
Drown sorrow in a cup of wine,
And let us all be merry.
Now all our neighbours' chimnies smoke,
And Christmas logs are burning;
Their ovens they with baked meats choke,
And all their spits are turning.
Without the door let sorrow lie;
And if for cold it hap to die,
We'll bury't in a Christmas pie,
And evermore be merry.
Now every lad is wondrous trim,
And no man minds his labour ”

“ Watching the ruddy embers gleam athwart the panelled hall;
Nor care I if I dream or not, though severed by the foam,
My heart is always in the spot which was my childhood's home.
CHRISTMAS
ROSE TERRY COOKE
Here comes old Father Christmas,
With sound of fife and drums;
With mistletoe about his brows,
So merrily he comes!
His arms are full of all good cheer,
His face with laughter glows,
He shines like any household fire
Amid the cruel snows.
He is the old folks' Christmas;
He warms their hearts like wine;
He thaws their winter into spring,
And makes their faces shine. ”

“ A great sense of disheartenment was everywhere. It was Christmas day, and hundreds of hearths were bright—but outside, away from humanity and its cheerful dreams, all Nature mourned, in the curse of the winter solstice, drowned in the water-flood. ”

“ Every look was now a pain, every action almost caused a pang, and both sisters ardently wished the time were come which should put an end to the sorrowful dream in which they now seemed to move. There was no outward demonstration of their grief, it wore the calm, grave, torpid aspect, that a dull November day presents, when the sky is all shrouded in a somber vail of gray, and the distant hills wear the same heavy tint; while no wind moves through the half-bare trees, or wakens the waters to life. ”

“ Listen: ‘Soon will the earth cover us all! then the earth, too, will change, and the things also which result from change will continue to change forever, and these again forever. For if a man reflects on the changes and transformations which follow one another like wave after wave, and with their rapidity, he will despise everything which is perishable.’ Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” said Sheila, and it seemed to her that she was being suffocated. Would not the gray walls burst asunder and show her one glimpse of the blue sky before she sank into unconsciousness? ”

“ As in the resurrection, we shall be changed ‘in the twinkling of an eye;’ so here, in a moment, our joys flag and decay, our delights grow dull,99 our activity is impaired, we are bound and frozen up, and it is altogether winter with the soul. ”

“ Then with wailings, deep and loud, Like the sea's in its unrest, Winter spreads his icy shroud, O'er the bare earth's frozen breast. Thus the spirit's early gladness, Sorrow chills or time removes; And the soul, in tears and sadness, Mourns its perished joys and loves. Hope will lose its trusting boldness, One by one its beams depart, And Despair, with icy, coldness, Winds its mantle round the heart. ”

“ Yet we should not forget that "the kingdom of heaven is within;" that it is the state and affections of the soul, the answer of a good conscience, the sense of harmony with God, a condition of time as well as of eternity. What is really momentous and all-important with us is the present, by which the future is shaped and colored. ”

“ To Flint's Pond via Minott's meadow. After a spitting of snow in the forenoon, I see the blue sky here and there. The sun is coming out. It is still and warm. The earth is two thirds bare. I walk along the Mill Brook below Emerson's, looking into it for some life. Perhaps what most moves us in winter is some reminiscence of far-off summer. . . . What beauty in the running brooks! what life! what society! The cold is merely superficial. It is summer still at the core. Far, far within, it is in the cawing of the crow, the crowing of the cock, the warmth of the sun on our backs. ”

“ To make a perfect winter day like this, you must have a clear, sparkling air, with a sheen from the snow, sufficient cold, no wind, and the warmth must come directly from the sun. It must not be a thawing warmth. The tension of nature must not be relaxed. The earth must be resonant, if bare. You hear the lisping music of chickadees from time to time, and the unrelenting steel-cold scream of a jay, unmelted, that never flows into a song, a sort of wintry trumpet, screaming cold, hard, tense, frozen music like the winter sky itself. ”

“ The tints of the sunset sky are never purer and more ethereal than in the coldest winter days. This evening, though the colors are not brilliant, the sky is crystalline, and the pale fawn-tinged clouds are very beautiful. I wish to get on to a hill to look down on the winter landscape. We go about these days as if we were in fetters; we walk in the stocks, stepping into the holes made by our predecessors. . . . The team and driver have long since gone by, but I see the marks of his whiplash on the snow, its recoil ”

“ The man is blessed who every day is permitted to behold anything so pure and serene as the western sky at sunset, while revolutions vex the world.
There is no winter necessarily in the sky, though snow covers the earth. The sky is always ready to answer our moods. We can see summer there or winter.
Dec. 27, 1852. Not a particle of ice in Walden to-day. ”

“ The soul is growing, tho we do not know it, in its winter weather, when all is dead and cold and dark; when the Spirit has convinced us of sin and we say, “I seem to have no part and lot with the saints, no joy nor peace ”

“ I tell you, humanity and nature have so much in common with each other that if you lose part of your pleasure in the latter; you will see less beauty in the trees, the flowers, and the fields, less grandeur in the mighty mountains and the sea. The seasons will come and go, and you will scarcely heed their coming and going: winter will settle over your soul, just as it settled over mine. And you see what I am.”
They had now passed into the cloisters, and they sat down in one of the recesses of the windows, and looked out upon the rich plot of grass which the cloisters enclose. ”

“ The bunkhouses, the stores, the offices, the stables, they must all be ready before the coming of the "freeze-up." Summer is the time of preparation. Winter is the season when the lumber-jack's work must go forward without cessation or break of any sort. Not even the excuse of sickness can be accepted. There is no excuse. The lumber-jack must work, or sink to the dregs of a life that has already created in him a spirit of indifference to the laws of God and man. So the life of the forest is hard and fierce, and the battle of it all is long. ”

“ As it were almost cricket—as it were even your play,
Weighed and pondered and worshipped, and practised day and day.
So ye shall bide sure-guarded when the restless lightnings wake
In the womb of the blotting war-cloud, and the pallid nations quake.
So, at the haggard trumpets, instant your soul shall leap
Forthright, accoutred, accepting—alert from the wells of sleep.
So at the threat ye shall summon—so at the need ye shall send
Men, not children or servants, tempered and taught to the end ”

“ There is no tediousness of solitude to him who has within himself resources of thought and dream, the pleasures and pains of memory, the bliss and the torture of imagination. It is best to have few acquaintances—or none—on shipboard. Human companionship, at some times, and this is one of them, distracts by its pettiness. The voyager should yield himself to nature now, and meet his own soul face to face. The routine of everyday life is commonplace enough, equally upon sea and land. But the ocean is a continual pageant, filling and soothing the mind with unspeakable peace. ”

“ In the desire after outward gain the mind is prevented from a perfect attention to the voice of Christ; yet being weaned from all things, except as they may be enjoyed in the Divine will, the pure light shines into the soul. Where the fruits of the spirit which is of this world are brought forth by many who profess to be led by the Spirit of truth, and cloudiness is felt to be gathering over the visible church, the sincere in heart, who abide in true stillness, and are exercised therein before the Lord for His name's sake, have knowledge of Christ in the fellowship of His sufferings ”

“ He is a very great man. No poet since the best time of Byron has written the English language so well—that is to say, with such affluent splendour of imagination; such passionate vigour; such nobility of thought; such tenderness of pathos; such pervasive grace, and so much of that distinctive variety, flexibility, and copious and felicitous amplitude which are the characteristics of an original style. No poet of the last fifty years has done so much to stimulate endurance in the human soul and to clarify spiritual vision in the human mind. ”

“ Reviving Hope and Faith, they show The soul its living powers, And how beneath the winter's snow Lie germs of summer flowers! The Night is mother of the Day, The Winter of the Spring, And ever upon old Decay The greenest mosses cling. ”