Nigel Slater - The Christmas Chronicles

It was the walk to school that started everything. A life lived with the rhythm of the seasons. Not purely the food (miles from a supermarket or a greengrocer, we ate more seasonally than most), but the outdoors too, the landscape, the garden and the market. The sounds and smells that mark one season as different from another.

By the way, I kept that school project, neatly written in fountain pen, its berry-studded exercise books covered in dried leaves and curls of ‘old man’s beard’, for almost twenty years. Like pretty much everything I owned, it was destroyed in a house fire shortly after I moved to London.

Getting to grips with the season

Winter is caused by the movement of the Earth, the dark winter months appearing when the Earth’s axis is at its furthest point from the Sun. For all its bare twigs and pale, watery sunshine, winter is very much alive. Underneath the fallen leaves things are happening at a rate of knots; new life burgeons. Bulbs are sprouting, buds are bursting through grey bark, new shoots push their way to the surface. Many plants require vernalisation, a prolonged patch of low temperatures, in order to grow. Tulips, freesias, crocus and snowdrops, for instance. (I sometimes feel I do, too.) A secret world quietly doing what it does each year. A study in renewal, rebirth, new life.

Winter officially starts in Britain on December 21, the winter solstice, which is the shortest day. I feel this is slightly odd. You would expect the shortest day to be in the middle of winter, not the start, but it gets more complicated when you learn that the date varies from country to country. Sweden and Ireland, for instance, consider the start of winter as November 1, All Hallows’ Day. Agriculturally, it is Martinmas, November 11, that is considered to be the beginning. Some cultures also measure winter by temperature rather than by the calendar. Others ecologically or astrologically. In the northern hemisphere we generally consider winter to mean the months of December, January and February. Just to throw a further wooden spoon into the works, this book includes much of November.

The winter light. Stars and shadows

The winter sky has a clarity and gentleness that I find more pleasing than the harsh, screaming colours of summer. Softer tones, those clean, arctic blues, the whisper-soft greys and pin-sharp paper whites, are the skies I want to live under.

The night sky is clearer in cold weather too, the stars infinitely more visible. During the months of December, January and February we are no longer facing directly into the heart of the Milky Way, whose brightness has the effect of making our view of the stars hazy and blurred. In winter, with the planet facing the galaxy at a different angle, we see fewer stars, which is why they seem clearer on a cold frosty night. A clear case of less is more. Standing in the garden, even in London, it is easier to read the sky on a frosty night.

Shadows are more interesting in winter too. More fuel for the imagination. As the Earth tilts away from the sun, the shadows become longer. This is why, perhaps, the walk home is more scary on a winter’s night, because generally, shadows are seen as ghostly, eerie, even sinister. That said, it is true that most horror films and ghost stories are set on winter nights (if there is a summer ghost story, it has escaped my attention), where long shadows lend a suitably mysterious, spine-tingling atmosphere. I see them differently, thinking of shadows mostly as benign and fascinating. I often move lamps, furniture and plants in order to get a clearer, longer, more intriguing shadow.

The landscape

The stillness of winter. Snow on a twig. A berry imprisoned in ice. The quietness of a frozen lake. The bareness of the winter landscape allows us to get a better view of the world we inhabit. No long grass and canopy of green leaves to confuse the eye. No fluff of blossom to deceive us (their blossom gone, cherry trees surely get the prize for the most boring trees on the planet), just the clean lines of a winter landscape. The architecture is clear and crisp. The shape of a tree, the path of a river, the outline of a barn, as clear as if they were drawn on a map.

I was brought up with the mother of all ‘views’, which as an eleven-year-old I somewhat took for granted. From our back door, an undulating landscape of meadows, woodlands, rivers, against a backdrop of the Cotswolds and the Malvern Hills. Snowfall would stay untouched for days, sullied only by the footprints of birds, rabbits, squirrels and foxes. (As a child I imagined wolves and bears too.) Walking in the plantation of Christmas trees that backed on to our long, thin garden was like a trip to see Mr Tumnus. No lamplight, but we had the moon to illuminate the frost-like glitter on a Christmas card. The joy of the little forest of fir trees in the dell was that they stayed cool in the hottest of summers too. A place for a child to hide and play.

The move to the city has brought an altogether different winter into my life. Shorter (city snow is gone in a heartbeat); frosted pavements trashed by pedestrians and the warmth from buildings; snow in London is as rare as hens’ teeth. I have lived in the city for thirty years now and have seen all too few proper winters. By proper, I mean those winters with snow deep enough to shovel. The bare trees, however, remain majestic.

I’m not sure you really know a tree until you have seen it without its leaves. Naked, so to speak. They are often at their most peaceful and romantic in winter, like watching a loved one asleep.

Without the diversion of leaves, deciduous trees take on a sculptural quality; we get the opportunity to see their bark more clearly, the dance and flow of their branches, their character and form. Large trees are bare for only four months before new leaf buds emerge, first as freckles, then as tiny, opening leaves. This is when I take them into the house; as large twigs break off the horse chestnuts in the street, I gather them up and stuff them, however large, into one of two capacious vases. The branches I value most are those that have a good horizontal, fluid form, large enough to leave a shadow across the table. As the season moves into spring, their leaves will often open, slightly ahead of those out in the cold. A gift.

Being out in the cold

Those who work outdoors probably have a different view of the winter landscape from someone like me, who simply plays in it. Fishermen, shepherds, road sweepers, farm workers, professional gardeners and those whose working life is spent mostly in the open air may have an altogether less rosy take on the season. Fair enough. Working in the fields, for instance, your fingers can soon become numb, your face raw.

Being outside in the cold is invigorating but we do need to keep moving. The body doesn’t like being cold and still, which in extreme cases can result in hypothermia. It wants to maintain a steady temperature. We shiver simply because the brain is sending a message to the nerves all over our body to move quickly to generate heat. We should listen to it.

I am rarely happier than when working outside. Digging, sweeping, walking, all do it for me. I find manual work in the cold as energising and life-affirming as much as I find it (deliciously) exhausting. Short trips around the garden punctuate my day. I walk rather than use public transport to go shopping. Each morning, I will usually saunter around the garden, coffee in hand, rain or shine, frost or snow. I live in hope of that last one.

Coming in from the cold

It is just as good to come in. You stamp to shake the snow from your boots. The flakes of snow on your coat melt instantly. Your glasses steam up. You close the door and thank God you remembered to put the hall light on a timer.