Campfire Thoughts: a love letter to winter

Winter doesn’t just create these exquisitely fragile sights, it also rations the light we have to see them by. The shorter days and harsher weather shift us towards a more indoor lifestyle, leaving the outdoors enticingly altered in another way. Those who embrace the cold see a different side to favourite trails and views, stopping closely huddled on windblown peaks, bundled in layers and warmed by exertion, to take in scenery made just for them. With the crowds gone, the soundscape also changes. Crisp air and muffling snow give a flat echo that drums around the hillsides and turns deserted city parks into places of quiet reverence. Smells become more intense as the cold seems to trap everything but hints of woodsmoke and we feel our bodies more keenly in the contrast of our warm core and chilled extremities. We sense all these things, but we don’t just passively receive winter, we respond to it and change with it. Our bodies react, ramping up a need for fuel and bringing about winter’s most joyfully indulged impulse, the desire for seriously substantial food.

As soon as the nights draw in, dark meats and steaming, rich dishes replace summer’s salads on our menus. Any country that experiences a real winter has its own variation of the classic culinary response to the cold - a heavy stew, full of energy, that weighs you down for an hour and keeps you warm for a week. Unthinkable in summer, irresistible in winter, as the body looks to put a layer of fat between itself and the weather. Even in an age of central heating and microfibre jackets, we’re only too happy to encourage this impulse. Only in winter can you drink a dessert and even accompany your marshmallow-covered hot chocolate with a solid slice of cake. It’s the season of mulled wine, nips of brandy and guilt-free excess, loosely justified by talk of hibernating, despite the fact that a few lemur species are the only primates ever to have done so.

In response to winter’s slower rhythms, we go from the immediate, impulsive pursuits of summer to a more contemplative state, assessing past, present and future. We have more time to ourselves, with no after-work beers in the sun, fewer weekend weddings or exotic holidays and the festival season well past. It’s a time for log fires, thick blankets and hunkering down in reflective, guilt-free inactivity, if only because you won’t hear your mother’s voice telling you that it’s such a nice day out there. We nestle in and consider our own wellbeing, taking stock and making bold resolutions that we secretly suspect will melt away in the spring thaw. But as well as looking in, we also reach out. Something in winter’s grey sobriety makes us long for other people and meaningful connections with family and friends.

In any normal year, most of us would probably spend more quality time with our loved ones in winter than at any other point in the year, especially with Christmas playing its part. The image of winter’s crown jewel as sacred family time has been endlessly reinforced in advertising, tv, film and music, but all of these tap into an innate desire for personal contact, rather than creating one. Despite the fact that a few well-placed days of leave can easily be strung into a fortnight off, we generally eschew adventures to exotic destinations in favour of overeating with our nearest and dearest. We all seem to long for a break from the pressure to be aspirational, for time when we aren’t measuring our lives against an imaginary standard of excitement or success and we can simply be ourselves. with the people we love. Christmas, epitomising the spirit of winter with its forgiving cosiness, gives us that time. We gather the people we really care about, forget what day of the week it is, stop getting dressed and do nothing more constructive than play board games. It might seem idle or even a waste of precious time, but we should never pass up the chance winter offers to sink into the warming comfort of the people closest to us.

Many of us, it seems, certainly don’t pass up this chance, at least in the romantic sense. Cuffing Season, the idea that people are more driven to couple up during the cooler months, is now an established phenomenon and, if the birth rate spike in late August and early September is anything to go by, all that snuggling in the cold really seems to heat things up. Physical closeness aside, winter is an undeniably romantic time. That same license to do nothing becomes an excuse for long entangled naps on the sofa or sitting with your other half, staring into the crackling fire in companionable silence. You share your dreams and fears with each other in scarf-muffled voices on chilly walks, making grand plans for the year to come. People might fall in love in summer, but it’s winter that binds them together.