Advent Images in the Bleak Mid-Winter

 

                                                  Hunters in the Snow -- Pieter Bruegel the Elder 

In the bleak mid-winter Frosty wind made moan Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago Voices United 55, verse 1

We've chatted about my perhaps quixotic attempt to share the artwork on our walls with you, dear Groundling readers. We have spent a lifetime rambling about in the outdoors and even in our decrepitude we continue to paddle, cycle, walk and swim as often as possible. We have been more intentional in recent years in expressing gratitude to the Creator and Advent is a good season for attention, intention, and anticipation as Christ's people. 

 Most of the images in our home reflect the natural world but hardly any which depict Winter. Today I offer up "the one that got away." During our last move we offered several pieces which had hung in various homes, including a print of Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 16th Hunters in the Snow. One of our daughters claimed it because it was in the family room of her childhood.  It is a remarkably busy painting which does have hunters in the foreground but also includes people in the distance on frozen ponds -- are some of them skating? Bruegel lived in the 16th century which was during Europe's Little Ice Age, a period of several hundred years when Winters were often bleak and harsh, snow accumulated,  and waterways froze. 

Not only have Europe's weather patterns changed in what was once Winter, the same is happening here in North America -- what should we call this season now, Greyter?  As I drove to the gym this morning it was 5 degrees celsius, light rain was falling, and lawns were green. This is not the Southern Ontario of my childhood and I miss Winter. More than nostalgia, though, these temperatures are an ominous sign of a climate crisis even though "you don't have to shovel it!"

At the risk of offending the Advent Police, I included a verse of the poem by the English poet Christian Rossetti set to music by Gustav Holst and sung as a Christmas carol. It's unlikely that Jesus was born in such harsh conditions but the verse surely captures the feel of a Winter which may permanently be a memory from the past.