Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Family meals

6 Fun Ways To Spend a Cold, Dark Night

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I love cold weather, but the shorter days are always difficult for me to adjust to. Over the years I’ve stored up a toolbox of activities to make cold, winter nights more fun. I find myself especially in need of them in the days and weeks after the time changes.

1. Eat by candlelight

We didn’t light a lot of candles in my house when I was growing up, but occasionally we’d eat by candlelight. Those nights, along with random power outages, are some of my happiest memories. Flickering soft light just makes any dinner more special. My family also eats by candlelight now and then. And every time we do it, it’s as fun and uplifting as I remember it being when I was a kid. Maybe it’s because it’s hard to rush when you’re watching the reflection of flames dance on glasses.

2. Start a fire

There’s so much to love about a winter fire – the warmth, the mesmerizing flames, the way it brings the entire family together in one spot to look at something other than a TV screen. Bonus: you may not have to turn on your heater to enjoy toasty nights.

3. Read aloud or tell stories

Years ago, an older friend told me that she and her husband had been reading books aloud to each other each night for decades.  I loved the idea, and since then, my husband and I have read many books aloud together. These days we spend our read-aloud time reading to our kids. But I know soon, we’ll move on to adult books again. There are so many great reasons to start a family reading tradition. I wrote about them in this post.

Storytelling is also a fun way to pass an evening. In Robert Shank’s book Tell Me A Story: Narrative and Intelligence, he explains that “human memory is story-based.” We’ve learned by telling each other stories since long before Homer. If coming up with a fictional yarn sounds more pressure-packed than taking the GRE, don’t worry. Just relax and tell stories about your childhood, grandparents, or past adventures. If you’re a parent, this kind of storytelling serves a bigger purpose: it helps kids recognize their place in a larger family and feel closer to their parents. Most people love listening to stories. And the more you practice, the better you get at telling them.

6 fun ways to spend a cold dark night #winter

4. Throw a potluck

With the extra dose of darkness, we can all probably use double-shots of health and happiness. Well, the research is in: social connectedness is good for us. Researchers from Brigham Young University recently reviewed 148 studies and found that people with strong ties to family, friends or co-workers have a 50 percent lower risk of dying over a given period than those with fewer social connections. As The New York Times reported, “Having few friends or weak social ties to the community is just as harmful to health as being an alcoholic or smoking nearly a pack of cigarettes a day.” Potlucks are a thrifty and labor-saving way to invite your friends, neighbors, or colleagues over. My acquaintances may just be exceptional cooks, but potlucks never seem to disappoint.

5. Stargaze

I wrote about winter stargazing in this post. Shortly thereafter I made bold plans to stargaze every night with my trusty copy of 365 Starry Nights. The first few nights of January, I had a great time scouting out Orion and Pleides. Then it got cloudy. And it stayed cloudy until … July. Yes, rainy Eugene is not a stargazer’s paradise. Oh how I miss the Colorado night skies. But if you live somewhere with few clouds and a dark sky, bundling up and gazing at the stars is an age-old, relaxing way to spend a cold, dark winter night.

6. Make Something with your hands

In her book Lifting Depression, neuroscientist Kelly Lambert argues that using our hands for manual labor helps us prevent and cure depression. She says that when we cook, garden, knit, sew, build, or repair things with our hands and see tangible results from our efforts, our brains are bathed in feel-good chemicals. I just got my knitting needles out after neglecting them for the summer, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see what I can make with my own two hands in a relatively short time (while I’m sitting in front of the fire, listening to a story, watching a movie, or otherwise enjoying a winter evening).

The Color of Springtime is in the flowers, the color of winter is in the imagination. Terri Guillemets #winter #seasons #coldweather

If you liked this post, you may enjoy these related posts:

What’s your favorite way to spend a cold, dark night? Do you have any tips for coping with fewer daylight hours?

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Resolve to Spend More Time With Family

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Here are six ways to carve out a little more family time.

1.  Share a family meal

Getting together daily to share food breeds family intimacy and bonding and has enormous benefits for children. In “The Magic of the Family Meal” in Time Magazine, Nancy Gibbs writes:

“The more often families eat together, the less likely kids are to smoke, drink, do drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders and consider suicide, and the more likely they are to do well in school, delay having sex, eat their vegetables, learn big words and know which fork to use.

2.  Take a daily walk

Incorporating a regular family walk into your schedule is a great way to bond with your family and get some daily exercise. And if you take it after dinner, it will also aid digestion.

3.  Start a family reading tradition

Carving out some daily read-aloud time for the whole family has many benefits. It creates lifelong readers, develops focus and listening skills, builds literacy skills, breeds the imagination, and it can encourage relaxation and restful sleep. Want to know more? I wrote about it here.

4.  Turn TV time into togetherness time

In a study of the daily activities of 1712 kids between the ages of 0 and 12, the more time kids spent watching TV, the less time they spent interacting with their parents and siblings. Of course, you can use television to spend more quality time with your kids, not less.

Here are a few basic tips:

  • The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV for kids under 2.
  • Restrict viewing time for older kids to 1-2 hours of quality television a day.
  • Find shows that engage your child intellectually or physically.
  • Watch TV together and talk about it afterward.
  • Read aloud about the same subjects your child learns about on TV.

5.  Institute an electronic sunset

If too much television, computer, or video gaming is getting in the way of family time, consider designating a time each night (like 7:00 p.m.) to shut off all of the electronics, phones included.

6.  Plan some adventures

It’s wintertime, and it’s easy to fall into a routine rut. Stave off those winter doldrums by planning some family fun, like a stargazing date, a trip to a museum or aquarium, a nature hike, or a day trip.

Do you want to spend more time with your family? Do you have any tips?

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The Slow Food Revolution

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(The fourth in a series highlighting U.S. Movements to celebrate, support, and spread the word about.)

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Carlo Petrini, an Italian journalist and political activist, founded Slow Food International in 1989, in response to a McDonalds opening in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna. Instead of focusing on his beefs with fast food – its highly-processed ingredients, the homogenizing effect it has on people’s diets, the social isolation it encourages, etc. – Petrini gathered 62 like-minded activists and created an organization to champion what fast food is not – the simple pleasure of cooking and eating fresh, high-quality food with others.

Today Slow Food International has 1,000 local chapters worldwide. They have an International Council, a President’s Committee, an Executive Committee, and an International Congress. They also founded:

  • Slow Food Editore, a publishing house that boasts a 70 title-catalog of books and magazines about food and wine production, artisan food specialties, crop varieties, animal breeds and food culture.
  • The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, which defends agricultural biodiversity and gastronomic traditions, especially in the third world. Their Ark of Taste is a list of foods or food traditions in danger of going extinct because of “industrial standardization, hygiene laws, the regulations of large-scale distribution and environmental damage.”
  • Tierra Madre, a network of “food producers, distributors, cooks, academics and all those who work for responsible and sustainable food production.”
  • The University of Gastronomic Science in Italy, which offers a “multidisciplinary academic program in the science and culture of food.”

At first glance, one might be inclined to discount the 100,000 members of Slow Food International as an elitist cadre of epicures. Their manifesto doesn’t demand an end to agribusiness, factory farms, feed lots, or genetically modified crops, but defends “quiet material pleasure” and calls for a rediscovery of “the flavors and savors of regional cooking.” Petrini talks about a “fundamental right to pleasure.” And Slow Food enthusiasts devote resources to “taste education” of all things, holding sensory workshops for children and taste workshops for adults.

Unemployment is nearing double digits, our prisons are overflowing, our health care system is bloated and broken, and our public schools are scrambling for resources to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, let alone hold sensory workshops. Surely we have more cogent issues to tackle than how our food tastes?

Well, maybe not.

dinner 2Petrini might just be onto something. Getting Americans to change our over-consuming, gas-guzzling ways by decrying our ills simply isn’t working all that well. But convincing Americans to seek out pleasure in cooking, eating, and sharing food is undoubtedly a more salient message. And that message alone could transform the world.

I’m not thinking about what could happen if mass numbers jumped on board to save the Amish Pie squash, the bay scallop, Blenheim apricots, or other endangered plant and animal species from extinction or fought to preserve traditional ways of making gumbo or New England clam chowder. I’m not even thinking about how the Slow Food Movement’s insistence on “good, clean, and fair” could transform our food systems if it went mainstream.

I’m thinking about what could happen if more Americans simply rediscovered their kitchens, cooked real food, and took pleasure in sharing more family meals. How might those simple acts change the world?

Well, consider the following:

  • According to The Dogwood Alliance, fast food packaging waste makes up 20% of all litter and food packaging takes up 15% of our landfills.
  • Officials at Central Alternative High School in Appleton, Wisconsin switched from serving the standard fare highly-processed school lunches to fresh, locally grown, low-fat, low-sugar meals, and the results were dramatic. Discipline problems plummeted, attendance increased, and students reported an increased ability to concentrate, less moodiness, and fewer health complaints.
  • A National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse study found that kids who ate most often with their parents were 40% more likely to report getting mostly A’s and B’s in school than kids who had two or fewer family dinners a week.
  • Integrated-medicine champion Dr. Andrew Weil was interviewed on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show recently about how Americans can achieve health care reform, and more importantly how we can attain actual health. His advice? Stop eating processed and fast food. “It’s that simple,” he said. “In the 1940s and 50s, my family … ate at least two meals together everyday and food was cooked from scratch.”

So, this movement championing pleasure might be more revolutionary than it sounds. It’s hard to think of a societal problem that couldn’t be improved if more of us enjoyed the simple pleasure of cooking and eating good, clean, and fair food together – including the state of employment, prisons, schools, landfills, waterways, or our health care system.

To learn more about Slow Food USA and find a local chapter, click here.

Are you a fan or member of a movement fighting for social, cultural, or environmental change? Leave a comment! Your movement could be highlighted in a future article.

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