A Few Big Changes This Winter

It’s that time of the year again. The days are getting shorter and colder, Christmas music is playing everywhere, and the cacophonous leaf blowing that dominated the last two months has finally fallen silent.

This winter feels very different than winters past. For starters, this is the first year my family isn’t doing anything special for the holidays. Growing up, holidays were a huge deal in my house, and I always eagerly anticipated the traditions and piled-high presents that defined Christmases in my youth. Especially when I was struggling with my mental health, Christmas was placed on a pedestal, the one time of the year when I might find some reprieve amid the darkness that’d consumed my life. In my late teens and early twenties, following the publication of Changing Ways, the holiday season became paramount to my writing career, a time when book sales spiked and I could make a killing at holiday craft fairs.

This year, however, there’s nothing riding on the holidays: no new books to promote, no beloved traditions to adhere to, no materialistic items to covet. My mental health is decent, so I’m not dependent on the Christmas spirit to bring joy to my life, and I’ve significantly cut down on the amount of stuff I buy to limit my impact on the environment and don’t need or want anything new. (Consumption drives a whopping 60 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions.) Perhaps most significantly, I no longer view the holidays with the rose-tinted lens that I did in my youth, this joyous cause for celebration where everything was shiny and happy. Because the holidays haven’t really been that for me in recent years. Truthfully, I’m not sure they ever were.

The holidays are supposed to be a time of the year when we can slow down, reconnect with our loved ones, and be grateful for what we have as well as practice generosity toward those who have less. For many people, however, they are instead a time of stress, of trying to make everything perfect, of feeling obliged to be available to everyone, and of becoming caught up in consumerism. The core values that the “season of giving” were founded upon seem to have vanished in our modern-day society, and I personally don’t have any interest in participating in the frantic, hyper-consumption stress fest that they’ve become anymore.

There are ways to celebrate the holiday season that pay homage to the spirit of it rather than the culture surrounding it, and these my family has prioritized this year: baking vegan treats to share with our friends, volunteering our time with meaningful causes, working a little less and relaxing a little more, being outside in nature, and appreciating our time together as a family. My anxiety has been pretty high in recent weeks for personal reasons, and it’s nice not to have the holidays to stress out about as well. It’s also a reminder to my parents and me that just as culture can change, so can–and should–tradition. What we did in the past worked for us then (sort of), but we’re different people now, with different values and interests, and we’re creating new traditions to honor that.

This is also the first winter that I genuinely enjoy the colder weather. In the past, I hated the cold and wouldn’t leave my house if it was below freezing. So naturally, it’s both strange and wonderful to not be bothered, physically or mentally, by the dwindling outdoor temperatures; to be running in sweatshirts in the low thirties, bundling up and going on sunset walks with my mom, and spending entire mornings working outside at the sanctuary in the snow. I actually find that I prefer the cold weather to the heat, something that would have been unfathomable even a couple of years ago.

Then again, a couple of years ago, I wasn’t very healthy. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that being depressed and slightly underweight is a surefire way to feel chronically cold and miserable e once the temperature dips. This was my reality for eight or nine winters, and it wasn’t until a year and a half ago that a knee injury, of all things, forced me to confront my persistent fear of weight gain. That’s a story for another day but putting on ten pounds for the sake of my health and my future in athletics may very well have cured my issues with the cold (my dietitian supports this theory). And years of therapy and self-searching have enabled me to overcome my general–and seasonal–depression.

It’s a drastically different, and immensely better, experience this winter, to have energy and proper body temperature regulation, and to not feel like I’m suffocating under a huge black cloud. I feel like for the first time, I can truly appreciate the beauty of the frost on the grass in the morning and the freshness of the cold air in my lungs when I run. Snow isn’t an inconvenience, something that prohibits me from leaving the house, but rather something to admire and enjoy, and also to be grateful for. The warming of our planet has made winters warmer and less snowy in Connecticut (as I write this, it’s almost 50 degrees outside), and I have a newfound appreciation for snow as a result, just as I do for any seasonably appropriate weather. To me, it’s a sign of nature’s resiliency and a reminder that it’s not too late to avoid dangerous levels of warming; that stifling summers and snowless winters don’t have to become our new normal.

The past few years of my life have been an unpredictable whirlwind of vast transformation and growth, and the subsequent changes that have come out of this period have shaped and bettered my life in ways I’d never imagined. (Case in point: I now like winter!) Embracing change has never come easy to me, but I’ve learned that a lot of good can come from change when we’re open to receiving it. I personally believe we all could stand to change a thing or two about our lives, for the betterment of ourselves, our society, and our planet.