'Natural Inducements to Jollity and Conversation'

The solstice arrived in Houston on Wednesday at 3:47 p.m. but winter arrives today. Forecasts suggest morning temperatures will peak in the low sixties and by evening linger in the upper twenties. On Friday, our weather man says, “lows will bottom out from 15 to 20 degrees north of Interstate 10.” That includes chez Kurp. In Cleveland this news wouldn’t have made the newspaper’s slop page. In Houston it prompts a run on batteries, bottled water and toilet paper. Neighbors are wrapping pipes and shrubs. My only concern is the likelihood of a power outage just in time for Christmas. 

I like the cold, assuming I’m indoors or, if outside, well-insulated. Because we are always “impatient for novelty,” Dr. Johnson found himself grateful for the cycle of the seasons and the inevitability of winter in the Northern Hemisphere: “The nakedness and asperity of the wintry world always fill the beholder with pensive and profound astonishment . . .” He writes: “The winter, therefore, is generally celebrated as the proper season for domestick merriment and gaiety.”

 

I sympathize with Johnson’s observations, though we might suspect him of a rare indulgence in naïveté. “Winter brings natural inducements to jollity and conversation,” he writes. “Differences, we know, are never so effectually laid asleep, as by some common calamity.” My experience tells me this is often true. To huddle with family and friends against the cold can induce a collective revelry of fondness, storytelling, nostalgia and warmth. It can also turn into claustrophobic, drunken, inbred nastiness.

 

In his poem “Gravediggers’ April” (For a Modest God, 1997), Eric Ormsby recounts the practice of storing the bodies of the dead in a shed until spring returns, the ground thaws and a grave can be dug. This suggests an intimacy with our forebears, a general familial closeness with the living and the dead, a shared respect that many have lost:

 

“In winter we comfort our dead with talk.

We entertain them with our idle gossip.

We whisper the news while our breath freezes.

We line up at the storage shed where their bodies lie

awaiting the great thaws of uncertain spring.”

 

And this: “The winter shapes our words.”

 

[The Johnson passages are taken from The Rambler essay he published on December 22, 1750.]