Season’s greetings!

Effective this morning, we can expect longer, sometimes brighter, days for the next six months. Then it will take several more months before days start getting noticeably shorter. We have a whole growing season ahead of us after we finish our long winter’s nap. But first there’s Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s!

I’ve been rereading Donald Hall’s wonderful Christmas at Eagle Pond, set near a small town in New Hampshire in 1940, when the author was twelve years old. It’s triggering at least some nostalgia for the “good old days” when life was lived at a necessarily slower pace and I was among the grandchildren rather than the grandparents. We won’t go into how many years it’s been since I was twelve.

Christmas from bygone days

Photo by J. Harrington

This year’s weather in our North Country isn’t very Christmas-like: foggy; drizzly; cloudy; unseasonably warm, based on a historical record that precedes our awareness of climate weirding. If polar ice is going to disappear, what does that suggest about a white Christmas in the years ahead? But, as Hall portrays, Christmas is about more than snow and presents.

Winter Solstice, Christmas and New Year mark the beginning of another year’s cycle. Hall has a wonderful poem about yearly cycles, although in this case the cycle’s end and beginning occur a little prior to the Christmas season. The cycle he describes could be a solid basis for responding to climate breakdown and adjusting our priorities to fit a new year with new realities.

Ox Cart Man

By Donald Hall

In October of the year,

he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,   

counting the seed, counting   

the cellar’s portion out,   

and bags the rest on the cart’s floor.

He packs wool sheared in April, honey

in combs, linen, leather   

tanned from deerhide,   

and vinegar in a barrel

hooped by hand at the forge’s fire.

He walks by his ox’s head, ten days

to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,   

and the bag that carried potatoes,

flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose   

feathers, yarn.

When the cart is empty he sells the cart.   

When the cart is sold he sells the ox,   

harness and yoke, and walks

home, his pockets heavy

with the year’s coin for salt and taxes,

and at home by fire’s light in November cold   

stitches new harness

for next year’s ox in the barn,

and carves the yoke, and saws planks   

building the cart again.

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