Winter Sleep Moon and Early Winter
A Brown Time…
The Hunter’s Moon went dark on All Hallow’s Day, which also ushered in the new lunisolar year and the new season of Early Winter. The Winter Sleep Moon was new on the Day of the Dead. It will go dark on December 1st which is the first Sunday in Advent, traditionally Boy Bishop Day and Tree Dressing Day. The full moon falls on the 15th at 4:29pm. If you’re keeping tally, you’ve noted that this lunation (lunar month) is, for once, approximately the same as the calendar month of November. This doesn’t happen very often. Only once every 19 years or so, actually.
The moon wanders about the solar calendar on a 19-year cycle, the Metonic cycle, named for Meton of Athens who first wrote down the calculations. However, he didn’t discover this phenomenon. The Babylonians based their calendar on the moon’s 19-year trek through the seasons at least a century before Meton came along. Many lunisolar calendars are based on the Babylonian calendar, including both the Hebrew calendar and the Coligny calendar, made in Roman Gaul over half a millennia after Babylon.
We changed our clocks again over the weekend. With the time change, sunset is at 4:36pm today, and by the end of the this moon cycle it will be setting at 4:12pm. But because we are getting close to the solstice we have a slightly longer twilight. Civil twilight, which means there is enough light to see by, lasts over half an hour after sunset, compared to about 20 minutes around the equinoxes. But even today, it will be fully dark by about 5:15pm, and the evening commute will be in darkness from now until some time in January. Even lunch is early. The Sun passes “noon”, the meridian, its highest point in the sky, at 11:33am. It is behind the mountains here in Vermont’s central valley by 3pm. We might have more light in the morning (for a while), but watching the eastern slopes head into shadow by mid-afternoon makes the days feel much shorter.
Of course, they are shorter. This is Early Winter, halfway from the autumn equinox to the winter solstice. Days will be less than ten hours long, starting the day after tomorrow. The change in day length does slow as we approach midwinter, but those minutes and seconds slowly add up. Day will be less than nine hours starting December 7th. And just before that we cross another marker: The earliest sunsets of the year, at 4:11pm, begin a couple days after the Winter Sleep Moon goes dark.
The Winter Sleep Moon is a lunation of creeping darkness. Night is still getting longer, but most days feel the same, with sunrise well after the school kids are boarding their buses and sunset before most of us get off work. But this is also a seasonal transition time. In fact, all the cross quarter days are followed by a few weeks that are in between seasons. The time after Candlemas is not yet spring, but winter is relenting. May Day is neither budding spring nor full blown summer. Lammas is still warm but the leaves are beginning to turn. Hallowe’en falls after the last leaves, and there may be snow, but it does not stick. It is not yet winter, but autumn is well over. I call this brown season Early Winter.
And it is brown. The trees are bare. The perennials are blighted and withered. The annuals are dead. Apple season is over here in Vermont, though there are still late apples and pears further south. The garden is covered in dry leaves that gave up their color weeks ago. The mountains are wearing a thin cap of snow, but most of the slopes are dark with evergreens and leafless maples. All this brown means no food. No plants to drink the dwindling sunshine and turn it into sugar and other yummy things for all the rest of us. No insects because there are no plants. Fewer birds because the seeds are all eaten and the insects are gone. Those who migrate are, perhaps, already soaking up the southern sun. There are plenty of crows, and the chickadees are becoming demanding at the feeder. But the goldfinches are gone. Hibernating animals are also gone to ground, well in advance of this brown season, though the deer and mice and rabbits are still wandering about gnawing on bark and roots. And while this means the groundhog is no longer ravaging the garden, the hard frost killed off the peas before they could bloom. No more food…
I do have my greens in the cold frame, but Early Winter is a hard stop on the rest of the garden. Traditional cultures in the north name this the fallow season. All around the northern hemisphere, there are taboos against taking from the fields and woods at this time of year. In Ireland, legend says that the Pooka (a sort of horse-demon Trickster) spits on berries and grain left behind after Hallowe’en. In Finland, it’s the devil and he rains spittle onto the hedges as early as Michaelmas. The Abenaki of Vermont, among other northeastern tribes, follow the rule of thirds in gathering plants. Take only 1/3 for yourself, let other animals have 1/3, and leave 1/3 to regenerate for next year. (Which only works if you don’t have groundhogs and squirrels…)
All these traditions recognize that we share the harvest of each year with many beings, though some traditions seem to have a low opinion of the human capacity to share voluntarily. The devil comes along and makes all the food unpalatable, in essence making it dead, so that humans won’t take it all. But perhaps this isn’t a protection against human greed as much as a consecration, a sacrifice. Like the pots that are broken before they are given to the gods, this rendering wild foods inedible makes them sacred, the portion of the harvest given back to the Land. To feed the few animals and birds that are still awake in these brown days. To leave seeds for the next season. To let leaf and stem rot back into the soil where they will feed us all in years to come. This is the sacrifice of today that sustains life tomorrow.
In any case, there is less sun, there is less warmth, there are few plants, and so there is less food. This is the time to slow down and conserve what energy we’ve managed to store up in the growing season. Our bodies know that less daylight means less food, but we are also diurnal creatures and our natural rhythms are to wake with the dawn and become sleepy at dusk. We may not hibernate, but we need more sleep at this time of year because there is more darkness and there is less food. Our bodies are conserving energy. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to lose weight in the early winter? It’s not only because meals are heavier and there are several metric tons of sugar flowing through the kitchen around the holidays. It’s that our bodies are programmed to hold onto the fat in the growing darkness. In fact, as I discovered when my thyroid went ballistic in late October one year, if you are not consuming enough calories each day, your body will preferentially break down muscle before it will burn fat. This is not the time of year to use up your energy stores because there is no replenishment coming from the land. This is the time of year to follow the trees, slow down, and sleep.
And if you ignore your body, Nature will find ways to force you to slow down in this season. Usually blunt force ways… Last year, it snowed on All Hallow’s Day, and the first big snow, big enough to delay school opening and close businesses for a few hours, arrived just a week later. Most of the month was wet and very cold with highs in the 20s (°F). My weather journal records snow a couple times a week throughout November 2023, and several big storms. On the 27th a heavy, wet snow took down trees all over the state and shut down power for most of the day in my town. In weather like this, all you can do is huddle under the blankets and sleep.
Even if you live in more southerly climes, you should probably follow the trees. They are the producers after all, and when they sleep, the rest of us are hungry. This is the fallow season. The time of rest before regeneration. We need this time as much as the garden does. So take it easy. Don’t start new projects. Don’t push yourself. Be quiet and slow. And even though the sun sets before you get off work, don’t turn those lights on at night. Just go to sleep. It is what you are meant to do.
Notable Days
Tomorrow is Guy Fawkes Day, in which things are set on fire to commemorate the hapless Catholic reactionary who was caught trying to blow up Puritan Parliament in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. It seems a fitting day for the election that also happens tomorrow…
St Martin’s Day is on the 11th. This is Martinmas, which is not exactly the same thing as the saint’s day and probably predates the saint. Martinmas is the traditional culling of livestock, killing many so that there is enough fodder for the remaining breeding stock. It is a time of blood sausage and chitterlings. This is also Remembrance Day, the day the Great War ended and poppies bloomed red. The Mayflower also arrived on Cape Cod on November 11, 1620…
November 22nd is the feast day of St Cecilia, patron saint of music. St Clement, the patron of blacksmiths and metalworkers, is celebrated the next day with copious ale and the firing of the anvil, in which gunpowder is loaded into a small hole in the anvil and then struck with a metal hammer. The sparks ignite the gunpowder in a small explosion. This practice is practical in that it reveals dangerous weaknesses in an anvil. But who doesn’t love a good fireworks show put on by a bunch of drunken smiths…
Thanksgiving falls on November 28th this year, fairly late. I finally figured out Thanksgiving. It’s not an autumn holiday, not a Harvest Home. It is and always was pretty much what happens on 34th Street in Manhattan… the opening to the Midwinter holidays, particularly the season of shopping. It is the Protestant version of St Andrew’s Day, November 30th, which is the traditional beginning of the Midwinter season. November 30th also saw the earliest known recorded eclipse. The moon covered the sun on what would have been November 30th if November 30th existed in 3340BCE, and, in Ireland, someone carved that event into stone.
Night Skies
This year’s Winter Sleep Moon is a meteor shower month. On November 9th, look to the south in the late evening to the see Northern Taurids. It is a weak shower, but it’s not at 2am! The Leonids, leftovers from Comet Tempel-Tuttle, blaze the predawn skies on the 17th and 18th. This shower can produce vibrant light shows from time to time, like the firestorm of 1833. But this year should be fairly routine with about 20/hour. It also falls just after the full moon, and so many of the meteors will be lost to moonlight. Then at the end of the month, from the 25th through the 27th, the Andromedids fall in the late evening. This is another weak shower, but again… not 2am!
There are a few other things to watch for in the night skies, if you are awake… On the 10th, the Moon and Saturn are in conjunction. Look to the south, high in the sky, at about 8pm for this close pairing. Then Uranus is at opposition on the 16th. At magnitude 5.6, it is just on the edge of naked eye viewing in dark skies. Binoculars will reveal a greenish disk just to the right of the Pleiades. And then on the 20th, a very bright Mars rises at 9:30pm alongside the waning gibbous Moon.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 