“A mind of winter, a mind for winter, not sensing the season as a loss of warmth and light, and with them hope of life and divinity, but ready to respond to it as a positive, and even purifying presence of something else—the beautiful and peaceful, yes, but also the mysterious, the strange, the sublime—is a modern taste.”

“Winter’s persona changes with our perception of safety from it. … The romance of winter is possible only when we have a warm, secure indoors to retreat to, and winter becomes a season to look at as much as one to live through.”

“In the past two hundred years we have turned winter from something to survive to something to survey, from a thing to be afraid of to a thing to be aware of.”

“The iceberg becomes representative of the ultimate common mystery of the mind—what you don’t see is what counts most—and the snowflake becomes a representation of the radical individualism of each person.”

“The final truth about snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall; that, buffeted by wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into ever stranger and more complex patterns, until at last they touch earth. Then, like us, they melt.”

“We celebrate continuity and want to renew it; we recognize that continuity has its discontents, and want to reverse it.” (re: reversal festivals and renewal feasts)

“The reason we should be engaged with material life is that our abundance can lead us to acts of altruism.”

“That’s the complex inheritance of modern Christmas. Our recuperative winter is one in which renewal and reversal, anxiety and abundance, epiphany and uneasiness are knotted together.”

“The earth does renew itself; we don’t. And so we want to connect our human cycle of mere growth and decay, where winter holds no spring, to the natural cycle of renewal. We can’t do it, of course, but we can’t stop trying.”

“And in that way the secular holiday, in its secular sequence, rhymes most powerfully with the sacred holiday. The secular holiday is the sacred holiday. I find myself moved by the specificities of this holiday, as we celebrate it now, and if I were pressed to say why, it is because what we celebrate is an idea, though not a simple one. The truth is not that modern people have domesticated and democratized a spiritual impulse, but instead that we have made material an idea that is material at its very core. That is the idea of the Nativity: that the infinite idea, the permanent Presence, the Thing Beyond All Things, might become the finite fact, the impermanent infant, the Thing that Wets Itself at Night, that kid in the corner. We all recognize that human renewal through the newborn child, whether its mother be virginal or merely young, is a glimpse of something amazing and miraculous in itself. Love’s architecture, as Crashaw wrote, is its own. The manger inside us, and the mystery of birth and renewal, imagined as sacred or simply experienced as life, remains miraculous. It can never be parsed by critics, only praised by carols. The bleak midwinter passes as we wing the beauty of the baby. These feelings are tied so deeply to the rhythm of the season, and to the rhythms of human existence that we make within them, that to render them as mere ornament seems adequate to their measure, just as taking them on entirely as dogma seems insulting to their universality. The force of the holiday is the oppression can produce new births, and that a light can go on in the middle of darkness.”

“One thing we can say for certain: the symbolism of the modern, ambivalent, anxiety-ridden, double-faced Christmas is winter symbolism. We need the warmth in order to enter the cold, and at Christmas we need the cold in order to reassert the warmth, need the imagery of the bleak midwinter in order to invoke the star above the stable. If the world has globalized Christmas, Christmas has winterized the world. And so the empire of the winter holiday extends from one end of this continent to another… It is necessary to assert snow in order to evoke sunshine, to make a theatre of winter in order to promise spring, to chill the Baby in order to let him do his thing, to submit to helplessness and winter in order to evoke power and new light. The simplest description of Christmas, which stretches from Scrooge’s social dream to the last chorus of the last bad song sung on Christmas Eve, is perhaps the deepest: it’s a winter holiday meant for kids.”

“If we didn’t remember winter in spring, it wouldn’t be as lovely; if we didn’t think of spring in winter, or search winter to find some new emotion of its own to make up for the absent ones, half of the keyboard of life would be missing. We would be playing life with no flats or sharps, on a piano with no black keys.”

“Winter stress makes summer sweetness—and the stress of warm times makes us long for the strange sweetness of cold ones.”

“Stress makes sweetness, and snow and ice are the frosting of loss.”

“That feeling that only the thinnest of membranes, the simple pane of glass separating the onlooker—the poet or the painter or the ordinary child—from the threat beyond is one that has receded from our immediate experience.”

“But instead we give the coldness names, we write it poetry, we play it music, we experience it as a personality—and this is and remains the act of humanism. Armed with that hope, we see not waste and cold but light and mystery and wonder and something called January. We see not stilled atoms in a senseless world. We see winter.”

“Winter is the white page on which we write our hearts.”