Winter Thriving Guide
Ritual, resolution, and how to love the season everyone hates
Happy Monday, good afternoon, good evening to my fellow melancholic depressives and welcome to your comprehensive, all-in-one guide to loving winter.
Winter lasts from the twenty-first of December until the twentieth of March. From Christmas until the first warm-ish day of spring, everyone in the city is always complaining. These are the “worst months” in New York. Muscle through them, we’re told. Put on the big coat, keep your head down, rot in your bed, order delivery, and wait until spring.
What a waste. These are some of the best, most life-giving months of the year. Only a fool would squander them.
Winter is wrongly associated with coldness, death, sadness, and the endings of things, when it is really about warmth, birth, joy, and the beginnings of things. In a season that almost seems designed to bring you down, I say go there, down into the depths of yourself, and take the opportunity to cleanse your soul with hot water and steel wool. It may take a lot of scrubbing.