Setting the Stage for Winter

Setting the Stage for Winter

Tucked inside a stony cave or underneath the roots of an ancient tree, our perfect winter house is hugged by the earth, a cozy burrow lined with warm, smooth wood and roofed with snow. See yourself standing outside, knee-deep in snow on a moonless winter night. You're cold and hungry and tired. You have pushed yourself so hard that now you have no strength to continue. You need rest and mothering, warmth and deep nourishment.

When you lift your head, you see the warm golden lights from the window of the winter house. You smell wood smoke on the freezing air, like the smell of safety and protection. Something delicious is cooking over a fire, you can smell the juices sizzling, the stew bubbling. Your mouth waters. Somehow you find the strength to get there, to open the massive wooden door and fall inside. Warm arms receive you. You have come home.

The perfect winter home of our imaginings leads us deeper into Mystery. From the heart of stillness, we create a place of nurturing and healing, a womb of warmth where we can dream while the earth dreams, rest while the earth rests. Inside the winter kitchen, it's always warm and golden, cozy and serene. There are blazing wood fires and soft cushions nearby, places to toast your toes and your spirit. Pots of richly satisfying teas are constantly steeping, and your favorite mug is close at hand.

Winter meals take time to simmer or bake, allowing you to dream by the window, luxuriating in the cozy warmth while the snow falls quietly outside. Deep quiet resides in the winter kitchen. You can hear a cat purring and the soft hissing crackle of the fire. Your tired spirit wraps itself in peace.

The Winter Kitchen

Winter holds a special holy day--Yule, the Winter Solstice--like a bright fire in the darkness at the center of the cave. Winter is the cave-time, and earth is winter's element. Earth is associated with the physical, the material--the body. When water turns to stone and the trees show their bones, winter teaches us about honoring our bodies, caring for them, allowing them to take a healing time-out from our culture's demand that we produce without ceasing.

We can make our winter kitchens into places of rest, security, and cozy warmth--and we can celebrate the austere beauty of this season in many creative ways. When we welcome Winter's colors and shapes into our kitchens, we are really honoring the sacredness of our bodies and of the planet. The pleasures of making visual connection between ourselves and our Earth Mother are many.

Before Yule comes at midwinter to deck our kitchen with evergreens, you may want to make a place on your table for a few branches of brown, dry leaves. Oak leaves, for instance, often cling to the branch well after they are withered, and beech leaves often stick around all winter long--so even the tardy among us can collect a few. These leaves become rustling reminders of earth-colored beauty, even after they have died.

When all the leaves are gone, bare branches can take their place in a vase. Arranging a bare branch on a perfect rock can evoke the purity and peacefulness of a Japanese Zen garden. Or you may enjoy creating magical little winter landscapes with rocks, moss, crystals (such wondrous bits of ice that never melt!), and twigs.

Early winter is a perfect time to make or find an earth-toned rag rug to stand on when you cook or do dishes. As you stand on its firm softness, think of your own ability to be rooted in the earth. And we can echo the browns, grays, snow white, and black of early winter in other ways, as well. Earthen bowls filled with smooth gray stones or deliciously scented, cinnamon-colored pomander balls, handwoven mats in winter colors, prints of winter landscapes--all help us to embrace this season of stillness and rest.

You may choose to echo winter's message of sleep by creating a soft burrow or nest on your kitchen altar, especially if yours is a hibernating power animal. If your favorite animals stay active during the winter months, you may want to put out some food for the ones living outside your doors. When you think about it, so many of our images for winter involve beds and sleep. We say that snow blankets the earth; even sleet is said to create sheets of ice! We can warm up our kitchens and make them the perfect places to hibernate by including soft fabrics to curl up in. Our Power Place may need a special afghan crocheted by a loving granny, or a woven blanket in soft winter colors to pull over our shoulders like a prayer shawl as we sit and dream about winter meals.

When the Winter Solstice arrives, we bring our attention to the green that never dies. It is traditional and deeply satisfying to fill our kitchens with holly and the dusky evergreens of balsam, pine, and spruce. Evergreens are a feast for the senses--you may delight in heaping your kitchen with an abundance of sweet-smelling swags, garlands, and wreaths. And it can be merry to include a small branch or even a miniature tree on your kitchen altar. In the spirit of creating cozy burrows and nests for ourselves in winter, you may consider transforming your kitchen into a real bower of greenery, fastening branches overhead and all around. When you light a candle (carefully!) in a kitchen brimming with greens, the shadows it casts reminds us of enchanted forests and fairy-tale magic.

Consider hanging reminders of the sun among the green, oranges cut into quarter-inch slices along with bay leaves or cinnamon sticks for a sweet-smelling festive kitchen garland. Dried chili-peppers, hung in bunches or strings, are another food-based Yuletide decoration, and cranberries are easy to string and hang, too. If you don't want food hanging around, you could make or buy small golden gun-shapes, which often come in beeswax and smell wonderful, to welcome the sun's return and to celebrate the promise of our own energetic reemergence in spring.

Greens in midwinter are usually enlivened by splashes of brilliant scarlet. Traditional holly berries, as well as rose hips, apples, dried pomegranates, and stagnorn sumac (as well as the aforementioned chili peppers and cranberries) all add notes of bright color to our festive kitchen. Bright orange--in the form of clementines, tangerines, or the fruit that gave the color its name--is another color choice for midwinter, one that echoes and celebrates the sun. Many of us keep a big bowl heaped with these healthful, cheery little sun-mimics for any snackers to enjoy after a day of sledding or skating.

We traditionally celebrate the midwinter season with liberality and bounty, a sort of sympathetic magic to invite more of the same in the new year. We can incorporate gold and silver--those ancient symbols of wealth--into our kitchens with spray-painted nuts, acorns, papier-mache fruits, and branches. Or we can go back to the roots of the custom and hide a few real coins in the bottom of a vase heaped with spruce, or tuck a folded dollar bill in a wreath made of herbs and bay and juniper, to encourage prosperity and abundance in the coming year. Take some time in the kitchen to think about the ways in which we are truly rich. Money is often the least of our many blessings.

But even more than the emphasis on undying evergreen and golden prosperity magic, the Winter Solstice season is a festival of light. At the darkest time of the year, we need reminders that the sun will return, that it will slowly strengthen, eventually bringing spring to brighten our lives once again. A few extra candles (especially handmade or hand-decorated ones) make wonderful additions to our kitchens. Tall seven-day votives in glass are often available in the Hispanic section of your local grocery store; just tie some raffia or ribbon around them and tuck in some sprigs of greenery or a few twigs.

Strings of electric lights, looped around the cabinets or wound around a wreath on the wall, can also be great fun. And besides the plain white or multicolored bare-bulb types, there are some great-shaped lights to choose from. Chili pepper bulbs seem perfectly made for kitchens, and I've even seen tiny teapot lights that would look right at home over the table or sink. It is also possible to find lights shaped like various power animals.

But while it's fun to decorate with lights and greens, it is also vitally important to honor our need for rest and stillness amid the frenzy of the cultural winter holidays. As one friend says, "The whole place gets lit up like a casino at Christmas but what I really crave is darkness and quiet." Try to take a few minutes every day for quiet time. Wait for a short time after dark before turning on your holiday lights. Start a simple, soothing teatime ritual to welcome children home from school on bitter cold days, or create a late-night Dark Time for yourself in the kitchen--after you turn off all the lights before heading to bed, sit in your Power Place in the dark and breathe quietly for a few minutes. You will be surprised by the difference those few minutes will make.

In late winter we begin to think about emerging from our hibernation. You may want to include some opalescent colors in your late-winter kitchen to remind you of the ice that will soon be thawing, the snow that will melt into spring. One friend hangs crystal points around her kitchen in January like little magical icicles.

The kitchen is the perfect place for forcing a few flower bulbs placed in vases, bowls of water, or shallow bowls of smooth stones. If you start them in early January, they may bloom in time for Imbolc, inspiring symbols of life's dauntless power to return again and again.

by Cait Johnson

"Witch in the Kitchen"