WINTER

When I was in primary school, a teacher obsessed with class performances forced us all to wrap our heads in white tinsel and call ourselves snowflakes. We held hands and scream-sang “WINTER COMES BUT ONCE A YEARRRR” at an audience of other school kids.

It was not a standout performance, and had nothing on our much more successful number, “Songs of Elvis”. But the snowflake song sticks in my mind because we performed it at the height of New Zealand’s summer, when the grass was turning green and the tar on the roads was beginning to melt. Our winter song was really an ode to Christmas… just not the kind of Christmas we normally have in the Southern Hemisphere.

Until I spent some time living in the upper parts of the Northern Hemisphere, where winter arrives with New Year’s and includes such characteristics as snow, I’d always greeted the coldest season with a healthy amount of dread. And by ‘healthy amount of dread’, I mean I moped around the house sulking and muttering the word “doom” while I waited for seasonal affective disorder to set in. During my first North American winter, when the sun started setting at 3pm and the temperature dropped so low that my hips froze, my dread felt different. There was still a little doom, some sulking, and the purchase of a SAD lamp that promised to replicate sunlight and increase my serotonin. But there was also a secret pleasure in how extreme winter felt, and how much the world around me had to change to suit the season.

I learnt about snow days, road salt, and not going outside when it’s deathly cold. This is how I discovered that my real problem with winter in New Zealand was not about the season, but the total lack of deference to the season. We don’t huddle inside or prepare our homes. We just stock up on cheap umbrellas and submit to the reality that our feet might be permanently damp for a good three months. There’s no pleasure in wet socks.

Now that I’m back in New Zealand with North American winters behind me, I’ve begun to see the seasons a little differently. In general, here in Australia and New Zealand, we celebrate summer like it’s the only three months of the year worth living. Winter is simply a season we struggle through, then emerge from like eager mice when the sun starts rising in September.

When we romanticise winter, it’s the winter we remember from movies about a North Pole Santa with an American accent. But there’s also pleasure in our own less melodramatic winter. This past summer, while I set curses on mosquitoes and washed sunblock out of my eyes, I found myself daydreaming about a future when the air would no longer be hot swamp water. In winter, we can stop fighting the sun. The air is crisper. Mosquitoes die. You can walk outside without increasing your risk of melanoma by 5000 per cent.

I’ve come to appreciate winter as a time to slow things down. In the past, I’ve fought against it, trying to make summer happen with the magic of wall heaters and good lighting. Now, I’m a quiet fan of winter’s frosts and long nights. My ridiculous vegetable garden stops asking so much of me in winter. Leeks and potatoes don’t need my attention. And there’s a cosiness that doesn’t exist in summer, when the thought of being near blankets makes me want to dry-retch from rapid-onset dehydration. Winter in the Southern Hemisphere – at least, where I live – doesn’t have the same charm as a winter that comes with snow and holidays and the end of the calendar year, but I don’t need seasons to charm me. I’ll take our winter as the mild, wet darkness it is, and enjoy it as a reprieve before summer comes again.