“The White Witch? Who is she?”
“Why.. it’s she that makes it always winter. Always winter, and never Christmas..”
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. C.S. Lewis, 1950.
“At this moment you should be with us,
Feeling like we do.. like you love to
But never will again.
I miss you my dear, Xiola.
I prepared the room tonight with christmas lights,
A city of candles…”
Three Days, Jane’s Addiction, 1990
My childhood winters were cold Northern affairs. Stretching across the horizon, the distant Pennines lay dark and brooding, looming over Bury like a dormant dragon, its arched back frosted with fairy-dust snow. There, we’d take our sledges and run them down those Lancashire slopes, fast and true: the icy air stinging our watery eyes, the sledge barely skimming the snowy ground below. We were Peter Pan, we were Tinkerbell.
Of all the seasons, Winter kindled the imagination the most: a twilight zone where reality and fairytale would come together before waltzing off into a blur. Each evening, with the garden shrouded in dusk and the air stifled by unearthly silence, we’d joyously roll about in the crunching snow, crafting igloos out of ice-bricks, crawling into these dens safe and snug from the creatures lurking just beyond..
..Then comes a mother’s call. A warm embrace. The sound of water splashing in a distant room. Steam slipping underneath a bathroom door. I’d leap into the bath, my goose-bumped skin ablaze with the sudden heat.
