Where are the snows of yesteryear? If we’re to be honest, nowhere. That famous line is the refrain from a ballad by the medieval French poet François Villon. A celebration of strong women from history, the poem has nothing to do with snow at all; and that oh-so-elegant “yesteryear” is a nonsense word made up by Dante Gabriel Rosetti when he translated the whole thing into English.
But if Rosetti hadn’t made them up, someone would have had to. “The snows of yesteryear” caught on at once, and spread like wildfire through European culture. Even now you’ll find references to them everywhere from Quentin Tarantino to Downton Abbey . Not bad for snow that doesn’t exist, and never has.
At this time of year, of course, non-existent snow breaks out all over the western world. Shops are groaning with the stuff. Television ads are so drenched in it that it wouldn’t be a surprise to see a few foamy white flecks escape out and drift stickily across the floor. Since early November, fake snow has been falling gently all over Ireland. And not only Ireland. Those of us who have family in Australia know that it falls there too, settling round the edges of a continent that is mostly desert, helping prepare people to swelter their way through the preparation and ingestion of a roast turkey dinner with all the trimmings when the outside temperature may be tipping 45 degrees.
As far as global capitalism is concerned, the only good Christmas is a white Christmas. We Irish people used to have that dream too, except we woke up with a bump after the winters of 2009 and 2010, when large helpings of real-world snow taught us that a white Christmas is not a feast for the eyes so much as a pain – sometimes literally – in the ass.
It hurts, when you tumble down that gap between imagination and reality, and bash your tailbone on the concrete at the bottom.
Snow, after all, is just frozen water. Christmas is just a stew made out of cultural bits and bobs: a couple of sentences in the Christian Bible thrown into the pot along with Victorian sentimentality, the rituals of northern European solstice festivals and the carefree debauchery of Saturnalia.
And winter is just the time when the northern hemisphere tilts away from the sun. A season of absence: absence of light, absence of colour, absence of warmth. It wouldn’t appear to be a cause for celebration, let alone the inspiration behind countless poems, paintings, songs and films. Yet when you start digging around for interesting winter lore, you find yourself knee-deep in it almost at once.
So does the American essayist Adam Gopnik in his new book Winter: Five Windows on the Season. Windows, it turns out, play a central role in winter as we currently imagine it – as did the development of central heating. Where, once upon a time, you had to huddle as close as possible to the hearth, the advent of a uniformly cosy interior space was a game-changer.
The growth of frost patterns on the inside of windows became a thing of the past: and winter became something to look at, something to safely enjoy. (That this revolution took place in England in the 1830s has led directly, it seems to this reader, to all those miniature Dickensian villages with illuminated windows – does anybody really collect an entire streetscape of them? – which populate Woodies DIY from November to January).
In pursuit of romantic winter, radical winter, recuperative winter, recreational winter and remembering winter, Gopnik covers a vast plain of cultural territory. He wanders from the Antarctic to the forests of German romantic painting, from the Snow Queen to Charlie Chaplin, from Vivaldi to I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. He examines the psychology of icebergs and myths about snowflakes. Most of them aren’t, as we fondly imagine in that winter in our heads, individual and gorgeously symmetrical, but “irregular and bluntly geometric . . . plain and blunt and misshapen as, well, people”.
Deftly argued and beautifully written – even when he’s writing about ice hockey – this book will be at my right hand in the long, dark months ahead. And if it does snow this winter I’ll understand at once why my heart is bouncing around like Tigger on espresso yelling, “Snow! Quick! Get on your gloves and get out there!” And stay indoors with a cup of coffee instead.