The Long Gift of December Evenings

The town is dark by the time the school bus pulls up the long street. The lights along the mains come on early this month—before the supper dishes are cleared, before the day has really owned its hours. Snow answers the dark by holding what light is left, the flat yards taking on that pale blue-gray that northern December has, the color of a quarry sky at four in the afternoon.

Inside, boots come off at the door. Steam rises off wool. The kettle goes on—or the coffee. The evening settles in the house like a guest who has decided to stay the whole week.

This is the thing December offers, and the easiest to miss in a hurry: it gives the night back. No other month asks so little of the hours after supper. The garden is finished. The lawn is finished. The boat is put up, the snowblower has been taken out and stands in the corner of the garage, a monument to the work that will come with the first fall. But tonight there is no work. There is the long room with the light on, and the dark pressing at the window.

In a small town in northern Minnesota—and the same good dark settles over the towns of Vermont, over upstate New York, over the dairy valleys of Wisconsin—people keep December's evenings on purpose. They are not wasted. They are spent.

The Hours After Supper

By half past six, the street is asleep, or seems to be. The porch lights make a chain of small suns down the block. Behind the windows, the real life of the month has begun. In one kitchen, a round of dough is being lifted onto a baking sheet. In another, someone is reading out loud, the book held in the lap, the lamp low over the shoulder. In a third, there is the click of needles, and the length of a scarf grows by inches over the course of an hour.

These are the traditional December crafts, and they take the shape of the container they are poured into. An acre of summer wants to be worked. A December evening wants to be filled with the hands, or the mind, or both, gently and without urgency.

The library stays busy in December, and the people in it are not browsing. They carry armloads. The books that get read in December are the long ones—the novels that have been waiting since August, fat paperbacks with cracked spines, the histories that require an entire winter. A person who reads a chapter an evening gets through a thick book before the snow melts. That is the pace of the season, and the season rewards it.

Handwork, too, is winter's habit, and December is its high tide. Mittens, sweaters, socks, quilts—these are slow things, and the slow dark is slow enough for them. Nothing about the month's evening work is hurried. A row of knitting, a paragraph, another cup of tea. The phone rings, and the conversation has no deadline in it. A neighbor drops by without calling first, because in December a knock at the door is always welcome, and the visit is the point.

Company is the quiet secret of the long evenings. The month is often written about as a solitary one—bare branches, closed roads, a single light in a window—but the towns where it is lived know better. The dark brings people inside, and inside they find each other. Cards are played at the kitchen table. A casserole goes to a house where someone is sick. The men and women who have lived in these places all their lives speak of December evenings the way other people speak of summer porches: as the time when the visiting gets done.

The Shortest Day

Everything about the month is in service of one quiet hinge: the solstice, the shortest day. It arrives in the third week of December, in the middle of the month's business, and it passes without parade. In an ordinary town, it is just another dark day—the darkest one. But people know. The milking barns and the feed stores and the school bus drivers have all noticed that the morning light comes a little later every day, and the evening goes out early, until the daylight is worn down to a few hours around noon.

The upper Midwest keeps its Scandinavian inheritance in small ways, and the dark is the oldest of them. The people who settled these towns came from countries where the winter night was long and taken personally. They did not fight it; they furnished it. They put candles in the windows, they hung loaves and wreaths, they made the house the sun. Their descendants may not remember the old words for it, but they keep the practice: in the week of the solstice, the lights on the tree and the lights on the eaves come on earlier than any other lights in town. In a church basement, a girl in a white dress and a crown of lights carries the candle up the aisle, and the children sing, and the dark outside the tall windows is a deep, comfortable thing. The month is not a complaint about the dark. It is an answer to it.

The solstice itself passes in an afternoon. The sun bottoms out, holds, and then—so slowly that only the most attentive notice—begins to climb again. The gain is tiny at first, a minute at the end of the day, barely worth mentioning. But it is a gain, and it is in the direction of spring, and the month keeps it like a held coin.

That is the gift of the December dark. Nothing about it asks to be endured. The short days are a structure, like a room, and the people of the northern states have learned to live in it—warmly, and with company.

The Month for Bed

December is the month of sleep, and the northern night is its accomplice. By nine o'clock, houses are darkening early up and down the street. The last light in a window goes out. The furnace clicks, rolls, subsides. Snow falls in the measured way of a moonless night, a soundless business that has been going on for hours without witnesses.

The bed in December is better than the bed in any other month, and not only because the day ends sooner. There is the cold floor and the warm blanket, the weight of the quilts, the satisfaction of going to bed while the dark is still young. In the morning, the alarm goes off into more dark, and the house proves itself again: the bathrobe, the heat coming up through the registers, the kitchen window steaming over while the coffee drips. This is the arithmetic of the season—cold outside, warm inside, and the difference is the month's whole meaning.

Sleep in December is not shameful and not lazy. It is a harvest. The body, having put up the gardens and the boats and the summer in its many forms, is simply taking its pay. The evenings end early and the mornings start slow. People who are always busy are, for a few weeks, exactly as busy as the dark suggests they should be.

The slow kitchen belongs to December as much as the bed does. This is the month of the long-cooking things: the pot of soup barely trembling on the back of the stove, the dough that needs two risings, the apples that were put down in September and are now applesauce. These are not tasks. They are the evening's company in edible form, and they fill the house with the honest smells of the season—onion, pork, grain, the steam off boiling things, the smell of a kitchen at nightfall in a cold town.

The Turning

By the last week of the month, the change is there to be measured. The evenings, which seemed to be narrowing toward nothing, have begun to widen again. It is only minutes, but the minutes are real.

Christmas lights, strung along the rooflines and wrapped around the porch railings, are the visible signature of December's conviction. They come on earlier and earlier, until at last there is barely an hour of the evening when the town is unlit. A person driving down a country road sees the farmhouses standing at intervals, each one wearing its line of colored fire against the snow, and understands that all of this is not about one day on the calendar. It is about the whole month, and the month's particular texture: the short walk to the mailbox, the ice on the windshield, the long evenings that do not end with the dishes but begin with them.

This is the December the northern states provide, every year, on purpose. The dark arrives at supper time and stays until morning, and in between it holds everything a person could want: a lamp, a book, a table, a kettle, a neighbor at the door, a bed turned down, the slow sound of snow against the glass. There is no need to hurry the month along. It is the season's deepest room, and the company inside it is excellent.