Every December 21, at the winter solstice, on the shortest day of the year, it is this strange feeling that inhabits me: that of having passed through our annual Great Darkness.
Our annual Great Darkness? I’m talking about this period, the most feared of the year, which goes from approximately mid-October until December 21, the winter solstice.
It’s the November-December weather, where the cold, the dark and the snow with no ambition to stay suddenly settle into our lives. At once.
I went to look at the statistics: in Montreal, on December 21, the sun would have timidly risen at 7:31 a.m. and set at 4:13 p.m. In Quebec, the sun sets at 3:50 p.m. And in Gaspé, bye-bye the sun at 3:23 p.m. Eight and a half hours of sunshine, on average in Quebec.
A trial.
We often talk about the holiday frenzy. But there is something more, it seems to me, than Christmas, vacations, rest, family, turkey.
Something simpler: the quiet return of light into our lives.
Am I the only one who feels like a small victory when on December 21, the sun turns around, and settles into our days for longer and longer?
Welcome sunas Jim Corcoran sang.
Resilience
I am convinced that there is a lot of our collective personality in this difficult quarterly period to go through.
Is it a coincidence that we named Duplessis’ regime the Great Darkness? We are In the land of ordinary life, where the ordinary is the norm, to paraphrase the essayist Mathieu Bélisle, but where only the darkness has something grandiloquent.
Besides, wasn’t one of the cult albums in Quebec, that of Colocs, called Outside November? Imagine an “Outside January” or an “Outside February”. The effect would not have been the same.
“Outside November”, it’s clear, it’s gray and dark, we understand directly the wave in Dédé Fortin’s soul.
And isn’t the most famous poem in our history titled winter evening, where Nelligan writes “Ah! how the snow snowed! My window is a garden of frost”?
Difficulty, misery, adversity, it is often through the darkness of winter that we imagine it in our half-country.
Don’t our resilience and tranquility also come from this time of year? We who have experienced survival, who define ourselves by “quiet permanence” and quiet revolutions.
We get through it
But we’re getting there. End of December is here. The light turns sideways. This is our annual rebirth.
A hot summer day is good, but we underestimate winter days, those that are cold but not too cold, where the snow falls quietly like a white ceremony and where the sun makes us feel remove a layer.
We got through it! We can celebrate!
Merry Christmas, dear readers. Take care of yourself.