THE SPIRIT OF WINTER

As it’s the shortest day, I return to the elusive search for the tangible feeling of deep winter magic—something constructed somewhere in childhood and increasingly difficult to locate as we grow older. Naturally, snow helps, but when the weather is bitty, oscillating between mostly mild conditions and the occasional cold snap, it’s hard to find or sustain that back-of-the-wardrobe Narnia place. Still, the other day offered an opportunity to pass through a pretend wardrobe of sorts: I attended Giffords Circus’s Winter Show, though I still found myself longing for that midwinter essence. However, it did bring to mind a childhood spent on the same soil where the circus now resides—Fennels Farm—a place where I remember my first impressions of winter and Christmas, accompanied by the smell of cheese-scented parlours and lavender pot-pourri, while horses sheltered in stables and foxes barked beneath the frost-lit moon.

I wonder whether the composer Gustav Holst himself wrote the hymn tune Cranham (1906) in search of that same mystical feeling which he set to the words of Christina Rossetti’s In the Bleak Midwinter, while he was living in Cranham—a village close to where I live. There has rarely been a greater evocation of that hushed atmosphere of snow, countryside, and reverence for the higher power of nature (and God), though it’s true that composer Harold Darke’s 1909 musical setting of the poem is possibly superior even to Holst’s original.

Either way,

Happy Winter Solstice!