Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Entertainment

Simple (and Free) Ways to Celebrate the First Day of Winter

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December 21 is the first day of winter and the shortest day of the year in the Northern hemisphere. Parts of Canada, Alaska, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Greenland, and the northern tip of Iceland will experience 24 hours of total darkness.

Winter could be a long, dark, and difficult time for many of our forebears. The solstice provided an opportunity to celebrate the return of more daylight.

How did ancient people celebrate?

Gift-giving

The ancient Romans exchanged candles and other gifts during Saturnalia, their week-long solstice celebration.

Role-switching

In Persia, the king changed places with one of his subjects on the winter solstice, and the subject was crowned during an elaborate street party.

In Rome, masters and servants switched roles; senators wore simple, rather than elaborate togas; men sometimes dressed as women; fights and grudges were forgotten; and other everyday conventions were put aside.

Candle-lighting

In England and Scandinavia, people lit a Yule log, or oak branch, which was often replaced by a large candle that burned throughout the day.

Bonfires

Japanese Shinto farmers lit fires on the mountainsides to welcome back the sun.

Mistletoe and Evergreen Trees

The British Celts put mistletoe on their altars. And the Germans and Romans decorated their houses with evergreen trees, wreaths, and garlands as a symbol of life and renewed fertility.

Sun Festivals

The Hopi celebrated the return of the sun with ceremonies. Priests dressed in animal skins with feathers in their headdresses to look like the rays of the sun.

Simple (and Free) Ways to Celebrate the First Day of Winter

Why celebrate the first day of winter?

The holiday season is busy enough for most of us. Why add anything else to the to-do list?

Celebrating the first day of each season offers the perfect opportunity to:

  • Note the cyclical changes in the soil, sky, trees, plants, and wildlife.
  • Reflect on the lessons each time of year imparts. Winter reminds us of the importance of quiet, rest, and dormancy.
  • Learn about different celebrations around the world.
  • Celebrate! Seasonal celebrations are affordable, nature-based, and as easy or elaborate as you want them to be.
  • Be grateful for the gifts of food, family, and friendship.

The key to celebrating the first day of winter, when most of us are busy planning other celebrations, is to keep it simple, and choose traditions that give you time to relax and reflect.

Simple (and free) ways to celebrate winter

  • Observe

Watch the sunrise and sunset. You probably won’t even have to set an alarm. At our house, it will rise at 7:44 and set at 4:37 on Tuesday. (The good news is longer, brighter days are coming.) You can find out what time the sun will rise and set where you live here.

  • Wander

Take a hike, go cross-country skiing, or go for a walk and look for signs of the season. Listen to winter’s music. Compare winter’s textures: dry bark, soggy leaves, and spongy moss. Notice winter’s distinctive scents.

  • Give

Find gifts for each other from nature. Exchange small handmade gifts. Make maple caramel corn for friends or neighbors. The key is to keep it simple.

  • Feast

Serve up your favorite winter crops: beets, winter squash, potatoes, onions, kale, cabbage, or parsnips. We’re fans of stuffed squash and homemade sauerkraut this time of the year. Lighting candles can turn an ordinary meal into a celebration.

  • Reflect

Spend some time relaxing together in front of the fire. Share one thing you’ve lost and one thing you’ve gained over the past year. Tell stories about your best and worst holiday memories.  Make wishes for the coming year. Reflect on the lessons of winter: the importance of rest, dormancy, and stillness.

The key to seasonal celebrations is to make them simple and relaxing. The last thing most of us need is another stressful winter tradition.

In the dept of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. -Albert Camus #quote

What’s your favorite thing about winter? Leave me a comment. I’d love to hear about it!

(Editor’s note: This is an updated version of a post originally published December 14, 2009)

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The Magic of Storytelling

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“Mama, will you tell me a story?” my three-year-old son Ezra asks as I tuck him in at night.

Who could refuse, right? Of course, the moment I utter, “The end”, the follow-up request comes: “Another story, Mama? About a turtle.” We usually negotiate the number of stories to three.

Inventing three stories a night and often a couple at nap time can be daunting. Fortunately Ezra likes to hear about the same characters over and over again: a little boy named Henry, a lion he named Anagoa, Horatio the hippo, Fiona the crocodile, and an elderly turtle couple who live by the ocean. He also likes true stories, especially about the rainy June day when he was born three years ago and the sunny September afternoon when I met his dad 12 years ago.

Like most things to do with parenting, storytelling could feel like a chore, especially at bedtime – a time of the day that recently inspired one dad to write a bestseller called Go the F**k to Sleep. But I’m enjoying our daily stories as much as my son for a few reasons:

  • It gives my imagination a workout.

Hanging out with a three-year-old is great for your creativity. They are master pretenders and can jump into the imaginary world instantly. Just as when writing, I try to include sensory details, setting, conflict, twists, and dialogue in my stories. Those devices make for more entertaining stories for my son, and using them is great practice for all kinds of writing.

  • It forces me to turn off my inner editor.

At the keyboard, I can go over the same sentence five hundred times moving commas around. But when I’m telling my son stories, I have to improvise and let the characters lead me forward. It’s great practice for writing first drafts.

  • I have a captive (and honest) audience

It’s fun to tell stories to someone who’s enraptured with your every word. When Ezra is still talking about a character or story days after I told it, I know I successfully created a world for him. On the contrary, when I ask him, “Was that a good story?” he occasionally replies, “Not really.” For a writer, honesty really is the best policy; it’s the only thing that makes you better.

The Magic of Storytelling #narrative #parenting

If telling stories sounds boring or more pressure-packed than taking the bar exam, you might be surprised at how much you enjoy it. As Lisa Lipkin writes in Bringing the Story Home, “Since the time we enter this world, we live in stories, inhaling and exhaling them.”

As a society, we pay lots of money and spend hours having people tell us stories on television, in books, at the movies, and on podcasts. We can also do it for free at home, and tap into the magic of live entertainment and human connection at the same time.

If inventing yarns holds no appeal, don’t let that deter you. Fictional stories can help us understand human emotions and relationships and take us to faraway places, but telling true stories to your kids probably serves an even broader purpose: it helps them connect with their parents and understand who they are.

“Our children need a sense of somebodiness,” Roland Barksdale writes In The African American Family’s Guide to Tracing Our Roots. “Giving them a connectedness to the past can help, which comes through story telling.”

When I was a kid, I loved the stories my dad made up for me and my sister, memorably nightly installments of the adventures of a pica. But I was even more captivated by my parents’ true stories about where they grew up, how they met, and about those mysterious years they spent together before my sister and I were born. Those stories placed me in a family, connected me with relatives I’d never met, and helped me to understand who I am. Most importantly they helped me get to know my parents and set up a family culture of openness, conversing, and enjoying one another’s company.

So if you don’t already tell stories as a family, consider carving out some time to do it. Once you start, you might be amazed at how entertaining you can be – and by how much your family loves this simple, free, and ancient pastime.

If there's one universal thread that binds all people together, it's their need for stories. - Lisa Lipkin #storytelling #narrative #parenting

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Celebrate the First Day of Winter!

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December 21 is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. Locales above the Arctic Circle, including parts of Canada, Alaska, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Greenland, and the very northern tip of Iceland will experience 24 hours of total darkness. You can find out when the sun will rise and set where you live here.

Winter was a long, dark, and difficult time for many of our forebears. The solstice provided an opportunity for people to celebrate the return of more daylight.

How did ancient people celebrate?

Gift-giving

The ancient Romans exchanged candles and other gifts during Saturnalia, their week-long solstice celebration.

Role-switching

In Persia, the king changed places with one of his subjects on the winter solstice, and the subject was crowned during an elaborate street party.

In Rome, masters and servants switched roles; senators wore simple, rather than elaborate togas; men sometimes dressed as women; fights and grudges were forgotten; and other everyday conventions were put aside.

Candle-lighting

In England and Scandinavia, people lit a Yule log, or oak branch, which was often replaced by a large candle that burned throughout the day.

Bonfires

Japanese Shinto farmers lit fires on the mountain sides to welcome back the sun.

Mistletoe and Evergreen Trees

The British Celts put mistletoe on their altars. And the Germans and Romans decorated their houses with evergreen trees, wreaths, and garlands as a symbol of life and renewed fertility.

Sun Festivals

The Hopi celebrated the return of the sun with ceremonies. Priests dressed in animal skins with feathers in their head-dresses to look like the rays of the sun.

Why celebrate the first day of winter?

The holiday season is busy enough for most of us. Why add anything else to the to-do list?

Well, celebrating the first day of each season has many benefits. It offers the perfect opportunity to:

  • Note the cyclical changes in the soil, sky, trees, plants, and wildlife.
  • Reflect on the lessons each time of year imparts. Winter, for example, reminds us of the importance of quiet, rest, and dormancy.
  • Learn about different celebrations around the world.
  • Celebrate! And seasonal celebrations are affordable, nature-based, and as easy or elaborate as you want them to be.
  • Be grateful for the gifts of food, family, and friendship.

The key to celebrating the first day of winter, when most of us are busy planning other celebrations, is to keep it simple, and choose traditions that give you time to relax and reflect.

Some ideas:

  • Establish a table-top, shelf, or mantel to display a seasonal tableau. On the first day of winter, replace the fall decorations with evergreen boughs, pine cones, candles, mistletoe, or whatever symbolizes fall in your family.
  • Collect books about the seasons at yard sales, used-book stores, and thrift shops year-round. Choose a special basket or shelf for them, and change them out on the first day of each season. Or take a trip to the library a few days before your celebration. Some of my family’s favorite winter picture-books are: Stella, Queen of the Snow by Mary-Louise Gay; The Big Snow by Berta Hader; The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats; A Kitten Tale by Eric Rohmann; Snow by Cynthia Rylant; Winter is the Warmest Season by Lauren Stringer; and Owl Moon by Jane Yolen.
  • Read aloud from The Winter Solstice by Ellen Jackson.
  • Go for a nature walk or go cross-country skiing, and enjoy the brisk air and winter scenery.
  • Watch the sun rise and set.
  • Make a seasonal feast, with foods like beets, winter squash, potatoes, onions, kale, cabbage, or parsnips.
  • Eat by candlelight.
  • Blow out the candles and turn off the lights after dinner, sit together quietly, and experience and reflect on darkness.
  • Share one thing you’ve lost and one thing you’ve gained over the past year.
  • Bring an evergreen bough inside and make it into a wishing tree. Secure the bough in a bucket with rocks. Cut leaves out of green construction paper. Have each person write down a wish for the coming year on each leaf. Hang the leaves on the tree using a hole punch and yarn or ribbon.
  • Sit around the fire and tell stories about your best and worst holiday memories.

Resources:

The Winter Solstice by John Matthews
The Book of the Year: A Brief History of Our Seasonal Holidays by Anthony aveni
Celebrate the Solstice by Richard Heinberg
Ceremonies of the Seasons by Jennifer Cole
The Winter Solstice by Ellen Jackson

Do you already celebrate the first day of winter? I’d love to hear about your traditions.

Is ditching the TV the secret to happiness?

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A review of:
Living Outside the Box: TV-Free Families Share Their Secrets
by Barbara Brock
Published by Eastern Washington University Press, 2007

The statistics about television-watching in America should concern everyone:

  • The TV is on for 6 hours and 47 minutes a day in the average house.
  • The average person watches more than 4 hours of TV a day. (That adds up to 9 years of a 65-year-old’s life).
  • 66% of people watch TV while eating dinner.
  • 70% of daycares use TV to occupy kids during a typical day.

What does this mean for America’s kids? The average child spends 1500 hours a year watching TV, as compared to 900 hours in school, and sees on that flickering screen:

  • 8,000 murders by the end of elementary school.
  • 200,000 acts of violence by the age of 18.
  • 20,000 thirty-second commercials a year.

It’s hard to imagine that all this TV isn’t having detrimental effects on Americans, especially children. And sure enough, anecdotal evidence suggests that too much TV contributes to all kinds of behavioral problems at home and in school. Kids have attention problems. They fight with each other over TV programs. They beg for brand-name products. They grapple with weight issues and obesity. They don’t play outside in nature. They don’t read.

When we turn on the tube, do we turn off life?

In Living Outside the Box, Barbara Brock mentions the personal and cultural ills TV undoubtedly contributes to, but it’s not her focus. Instead she asks us to ponder what we miss out on when we’re sitting and mindlessly observing so much of our lives away. After all we could be reading, writing, painting, crafting, traveling, cooking, baking, hanging out with friends, playing instruments, singing, gardening, exploring, running, walking, or just playing. We could actually be living.

A very small minority of Americans (less than 1%) lives TV-free. Brock sent 500 of them surveys to find out about them. Who are these rebels? Well, they vary widely, but the striking thing is, most don’t miss TV at all. More surprising, their kids don’t seem to miss it. Brock’s research makes you wonder – are kids more addicted to the television, or are  their parents? Even if you can’t seem to drag your kids away from the tube, you might be surprised at their reactions if you shut it off altogether. Of kids who pledged to ditch TV for three months, many reported it as the best time in their lives.

TV night: Relaxing or stressful?

Brock makes a lot of cogent points, but one most registers with me: she points out how watching TV, even in small amounts, structures our time. For instance, you don’t want to miss a favorite program so you rush home from a night out, or you race through dinner, or you hurry through a phone call with a friend. You always have one eye on the clock.

Sure enough, we have a TV night in our house, and it’s always more stressful than other nights. We rush around to get everything done before the shows come on. Usually our evenings just sort of unfold. We turn on music, we talk, we play with the baby, we clean, we play games together, or we read. We glance at the clock occasionally, but it doesn’t dominate our nights. I feel better on these TV-free nights. I sleep better. But I’m not sure it’s the TV that makes me feel stressed, or just watching the clock.

The computer counts too.

I was surprised that by Brock’s definition, my family is already TV-free. Brock considers anything under six hours a week TV-free, and we watch about two to four hours. But every time I wanted to feel smug about my TV-free ways, Brock slipped in a mention of computer time. Oh yeah, that. I know aimless Googling and Facebooking doesn’t make me happy, but I find myself clicking away at the mouse a little too often.

Searching for balance.

Living Outside the Box is a fast and easy-to-read book. It will undoubtedly make you ponder how entrenched TV is in our lives and what kind of impact it’s collectively having on our society. Could Brock’s arguments convince a die-hard TV addict to change her ways? I doubt it. And if you lean toward the TV-free life already (which I suspect most people who read the book do) you may feel a tad hopeless reflecting on how entrenched television is in most people’s lives – a little like a teetotaler stuck in a tavern. After all, it doesn’t matter if you’re hellbent on knowing all your neighbors better than the cast of Survivor unless your neighbors feel the same way. However, if you’re thinking about ditching the TV, and concerned that it might turn your kids into social deviants, Brock’s research might ease your mind.

I picked up Living Outside the Box because my baby’s getting to the age where the television sucks him in. When he gazes at it and his eyes start to glaze over, my instinct is to shut it off – for good. It’s not that I think TV will destroy him or make him into a zombie. After all, I watched my share of I Love Lucy marathons as a kid. I just want his childhood to be full of music, books, friends, and nature. I want his time to be unstructured and unhurried. I want him to be satisfied with all of the comforts and joy we have in our lives, not to be constantly told he needs more toys, cereal, clothes, or candy to feel good. Most of all, I want him to have a real life, not a childhood spent observing fictional kids on television living.

But I’m just not convinced we should put the TV out with the garbage. One of those four hours of TV we usually watch each week is The Bill Moyer’s Journal on PBS, and every time I start thinking of TV as evil, I see Moyer’s lopsided grin. That show, and a few others – like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, and Freaks and Geeks – have added something to my life. They’ve make me think, or laugh so hard I can’t breathe, or see the world a little bit differently. They’ve made me happy. I know the real answer is to only invite in the television programs that stimulate my family. But what a challenge that is – especially with kids.

Celebrate TV Turn Off Week – April 20-26, 2009

Brock did inspire me to give up all of my screen-time for TV Turn-Off Week – (gulp) even my precious Internet. That means I won’t be blogging next week … but I’ll be doing lots of living, which will contribute to future blogs. On Sunday we’re putting in a new vegetable garden and adopting a flock of hip, urban, backyard chicks. I’ll be journaling those endeavors for the blog. And I’ll have lots of time to research for future blogs using my favorite sources – good, old-fashioned books.

What do you think?

I’d love to hear how TV fits into your life. Do you have TV-free or TV-addicted kids? Have you struck some kind of balance? Are you participating in TV Turn-Off Week? Why or why not?

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