In the Bleak Midwinter

Reflections on the Solstice Season

Before we get to our lyrical explorations…

Public Service Announcement: Reclaim the Twelve Days of Christmas for a longer and more meaningful holiday!

Beyond singing about partridges and pear trees, most of us have left the good ol’ Twelve Days in the dustbin of history.

Formally beginning on Christmas Eve, it stretches on to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and the Epiphany (when those drag-ass wise men finally showed up to the manger). By the time it’s all wrapped up on Jan 6, we’re back to school and work emails.

The magic of the season is long gone.

(plus that date has certain, umm, how shall we say, connotations these days)

A better more modern update?

Slide the whole celebration up a week.

Kick off your Twelve Days of Christmas on the 21st with the Solstice.

You get to bust out the egg nog and Christmas rations early. You might even snog under some mistletoe, light a few candles or set a Yule log on fire if you’re feeling your pagan roots.

Then when you get to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and Boxing Day (the 26th for you colonials) you’re already warmed up and solidly in the spirit of the season.

For kids, it dampens the impossible sugar high out over a longer time period. And it gives us all of permission for that interstitial breather between Christmas and New Years. Wrapping up with New Year’s Day as our last guilt-free holy day of R&R, we greet the coming month on the front foot, revitalized.

It’s so tidy and elegant it’s hard to believe this wasn’t how it was always supposed to be.

And if you’ve got kids or grandkids, super recommend Jan Brett’s giant hardback Christmas Treasury. as a companion to this season. It’s filled with gorgeous illustrations and Scandinavian folk tales (along with Twelve Days of Christmas carol and The Night Before Christmas). You can start with a story on the Solstice, and read them through the twelve days, even singing the eponymous carol each night.

(don’t worry, it gets better as you get better!)

Easy peasy way to bump up the vibes, and extend the love this holiday season. No extra guts-ing or consumer consumption required!

***

Onto the topic of today’s title: In the Bleak Midwinter

In England, this carol is a perennial favorite. Moody, melancholy. I can still remember singing it in the chapel of our boarding school. Frosty lawns. Gray flannel shorts despite the season. Jazzy little school boy cap (AC/DCs guitarist wore the same onstage)

In the bleak midwinter
frosty wind made moan,
earth stood hard as iron,
water like a stone:
snow had fallen,
snow on snow, snow on snow,
in the bleak midwinter,
long ago.

For generations of Brits, it spoke to the cold hard conditions of life in and out of wars. Of rationing and armistices. Of blitzes and poppy days. Of a plaintive yearning for something more, forever out of reach.

“Desperation,” Pink Floyd reminded us later, “is the English way.”

More recent audiences, might have come to the carol via the hit show Peaky Blinders– actor Cillian Murphy’s breakout role as a gypsy genius gangster in post WWI Birmingham.

For his character Tommy Shelby and his brothers in arms, the phrase “In the Bleak Midwinter” reminds them of the brief and fleeting nature of life. Especially theirs.’

Abandoned behind enemy lines in France during the First World War, these men assumed they were going to get slaughtered by the Prussians. Their minister suggested they prepare for their end by singing the carol.

Only the Prussians never came and they were miraculously spared.

Returning home across the Channel, they felt they were living on borrowed time. That they were already dead, but reborn in some way.

Over the years, they’d end up repeating the phrase “In the Bleak Midwinter” when someone was close to an especially epic or ironic death.

It felt a bit like Samuel Jackson reciting the “Though I walk through the shadow of the Valley of Death” riff in Pulp Fiction

“I just thought it was some cold-blooded shit to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass.”

So the Peaky Blinders version of “In the Bleak Midwinter” functioned somewhat like that. A gangster’s quip at Death’s door.

But there’s more to it.

“earth stood hard as iron,
water like a stone…

in the bleak midwinter,
long ago.”

Hardly matches the weather reports from ancient Palestine! Even before all that global warming stuff.

Rather, it reflects a spiritual climate–one where life and love are frozen. Where hope is inaccessible.

By the time we get to the final verse, the humble narrator (who’s shown up in time for the OG January Sixth–) storms the capital manger.

Up against the wealth and resources of shepherds and wise men, they’re at a loss as to what to bestow on the Christ Child.

What can I give him,
poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd,
I would bring a lamb,
if I were a wise man
I would do my part,
yet what I can I give him,
give my heart.

Concluding, that the only thing they have to give is their love.

If we read this carol through the lens of our times, it still kinda tracks.

The harsh and unforgiving landscape, “snow on snow on snow” might reflect our current malaise of meaning. Optimism, connection, and community feel impossibly far off. Farther off than spring. Maybe not coming this year or the next.

The ground is so cold and hard around us, how could anything ever grow again?

And as we assess our worth and our value, we may conclude that we have nothing of merit to give the world. In any era of constant FOMOing and Billionaire Bling, our own existences can feel downright impoverished. Even as we drown in Stuff.

No sacrificial lambs. No gold or incense. (or clicks or likes) to give.

But still there’s something we’ve always had, and no one can take. Our hearts. And whom we choose to devote them to.

Love, given freely and without return, remains a revolutionary act.

This carol reminds us of something radical about Christianity that appears to be increasingly forgotten. It’s never been about power. or wealth It’s always been about humility and hope.

Even in the darkest hours.

Even in the bleakest winter.

***

Hopefully you’re now suitably inspired to kick off your holiday season on the Solstice rather than waiting for the 24th.

Here’s one last story to help you get your Druid on for that festival of light.

The quintessential English carol the Holly and the Ivy.

Its roots actually go back father than you’d imagine, and were nearly lost right around the same time that In the Bleak Midwinter was blowing up for the Peaky Blinders gang.

In 1909 Cecil Sharp, a famous collector of folk songs (like a British Alan Lomax), retrieved a single transcription of this song from a woman in Gloucestershire. If not for her, this medieval classic might’ve vanished from the modern era.

Instead, it survived as one of the clearest examples of pagan symbolism getting smuggled into Christian caroling.

The holly and the ivy
when they are both full grown,
of all the trees that are in the wood
the holly bears the crown.

The rising of the sun
and the running of the deer,
the playing of the merry organ,
sweet singing in the choir.

Subsequent verses go on to connect each element of the holly, from its red berries “like his blood,” to the sharp thorns “like his crown”, to its bitter bark “like his gall.” In all, the lyrics lean harder into the passion of Easter week than into mangers and nativities.

But we can chalk all that explicit symbolism up to some pious rewrites late in the game.

In reality, the Holly and Ivy is a callback to ancient British solstice songs. In the Druid tradition, the holly, all stiff and prickly, represented the masculine. Ivy all soft and entwining, represented the feminine. Men and women would gather and engage in medieval pagan rap battles about their various merits, “The Contest of the Holly and the Ivy.”

These Twelve Days of Christmas, lost in the gap between the Julian and Gregorian calendars, was always the Time of Misrule. When peasants terrorized lords, and wassailing carolers made trick or treat threats.

#giveusfiggypudding

#cantstopwontstop

#untilwegetsome

By the time we get to the refrain, the “rising of the sun and the running of the deer” we’re fully in pagan Solstice land. Speaking of the return of the light to the forest and the Stag King bringing fertility back to the land (after his inevitable sacrifice)

If you’re a Tom Robbins fan, you might’ve caught wind of these kinds of tales from Jitterbug Perfume, his epic tale of immortality and ancient gods. He in turn picked it up from Robert Graves, England’s poet laureate (who Joseph Campbell wanted to be when he grew up) and author of the White Goddess. If you’ve ever heard of the triple threat Maiden-Mother-Crone, that’s likely Graves’ doing.

And Graves, in turn, picked it up from the all time classic James Frazer’s Golden Bough, which spoke of sacrificial kings as a recurring motif throughout mythic history.

He always had to die to ensure the fertility of the land. His blood fed and watered the crops. And the people were redeemed.

“Mankind has always crucified and burned” Goethe helpfully reminds us.

The Nazarene, following in the footsteps of John Barleycorn and Osiris, was just the latest to take up that cross.

But this is not the season for that part of the tale.

This is the season to celebrate the Light. Even as we still gather in the Dark.

Oh king of kings and light of lights! Our stories sing of mangered nights

Old Lao Tzu, the Wizened Babe

By living true, all truths unmade.

Into a joke, a cosmic jest

Just up in smoke, forget the rest!

And so be free to dance and sing

(and so shall we make whole the Ring)

Of woven ones and weavers too

And dreamers dreamed right from the blue

By now we know this story’s end

The Light of Life so fast it bends

All Space and Time to fit the weave

Make straight the lines

Grow back the leaves!

Which brings us still back to the start

No sword can kill this radiant heart.

Advent is the time of “coming towards.” It’s our annual celebration of the cycles of life. Of death and rebirth.

For this part of the story, we get to focus on the birth. And the return of light.

Not because it’s summer.

But because here we stand, In the bleak midwinter.

And it can only get better from here.

Fiat Lux, et Felix Nativitas!