We took down our tree this week. The limbs were drooping low and dropping needles everywhere—we’ll find them in couch cushions and the linings of our shoes for months, I’m sure.

I saw a joke online about how quickly the tide can turn from Christmas decorations feeling cozy and vibey to feeling like aggressive clutter. That’s it, time to take it all down, we feel suddenly. I’m familiar with that breaking point. But this year I don’t want to see any of it go.

I’ve been in a suspended slow period lately, an interior winter. I won’t lie: I love it. Now that my boys are back in school—and when I’m not working on freelance work—I’m spending time reading far too many books and going on plenty of walks (before I threw my back out earlier this week).

When we turn inward—whether literally indoors during colder months or metaphorically inward during moments of loss, redirection, or pause—I think it’s natural to want to adorn the space a bit. If we’re going to spend more hours inside, or in the quiet stretch of our interior landscape, we want it to feel as bright and comforting as possible. We want candlelight and steaming cups of tea and heavy blankets. But that doesn’t mean the dark isn’t encroaching. These small comforts insulate us from the stark reality of winter, softening it a bit. Beyond our windows, a different reality plays out.

I’m embracing that inward and outward winter, but I don’t want to see the tree and its lights go. I want to hang on a little longer.

Jane Kenyon writes a poem about this exact sensation and the way winter brings us close to death in all its forms. Here is the poem in its full form, from Poetry Foundation.

Taking Down the Tree

By Jane Kenyon

"Give me some light!" cries Hamlet's

uncle midway through the murder

of Gonzago. "Light! Light!" cry scattering

courtesans. Here, as in Denmark,

it's dark at four, and even the moon

shines with only half a heart.

The ornaments go down into the box:

the silver spaniel, My Darling

on its collar, from Mother's childhood

in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack

my brother and I fought over,

pulling limb from limb. Mother

drew it together again with thread

while I watched, feeling depraved

at the age of ten.

With something more than caution

I handle them, and the lights, with their

tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along

from house to house, their pasteboard

toy suitcases increasingly flimsy.

Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop.

By suppertime all that remains is the scent

of balsam fir. If it's darkness

we're having, let it be extravagant.

If it’s darkness / we’re having, let it be extravagant. Yes, that.

Do you see how death and violence open a poem about taking down the Christmas tree? In Hamlet, King Claudius craves the light because Hamlet has put on a play that pierces him with guilt—and rightly so, for he killed Hamlet’s father.

The darkness forces him to face a truth he’d rather ignore.

And then of course there’s the much more innocuous violence of the speaker’s younger self and her brother, who pulled apart a Christmas ornament “limb from limb.” There’s the death of an old dog, now memorialized as merely, “My Darling.”

When the “desiccated needles drop” from the tree, they make the sound of a clock, and the sense is that time is slipping away from the speaker. The bleak, blank length of late winter is coming, and it bears with it some measure of death.

Kenyon seems to say, in not so many words: It can be pretty dreary here. It’s all going to die anyway. Shouldn’t we make it beautiful in the meantime?

Dylan Thomas, of course, puts it this way in his famed villanelle, “Do not go gentle into that good night”:

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

We cling to light because it’s instinctual. And because darkness forces us to confront truths we’d rather keep tucked away. That darkness is never nearer than in winter.

In her slim book-length essay, Winter Solstice, Nina Maclaughlin is on speaking terms with this darkness:

“Winter makes us know the hollows. Darkness creeps in from both sides and pushes us to that pure ridge, all the way exposed … The fear is ancient and uncomplicated … will the darkness swallow me, will it swallow us all together? Will I see the spring?”

In a later portion of the essay, she voices the universal human response to that dark fear—the urge to “Bring light back to life.”

Whatever it means to face our small deaths or the death of the natural world around us (and let us not forget its eventual resurrection), I think it also means that we can hold more dearly the moments of light. They mean more in winter, somehow.

Let it be extravagant, then.

Unexpected Spiritual Practices for Interior Winters:

• Read the poem by Jane Kenyon above three times. Try reading it aloud one (or all) of those times. What words or images stand out to you? What feelings does it evoke?

• Some night this week, turn off all the lights in a room. Light a single candle. Hold your attention on the flame for a while, and consider this quote from Winter Solstice: “To share a room with flame is to feel a living presence in the room with you.” What does the flame make you feel or remember? Say a prayer, or simply rest your mind for a moment. When you blow it out, notice how dark it is without the candle’s light.

• Read a wintry book. Katherine May’s Wintering is a forever favorite of mine. Her imagery is immaculate, and she speaks so well to the ways winter can carry and even bless us. I also love the Winternight Trilogy, full of the fierce Vasilisa and her travels. And I’ve just picked up Kristin Lavransdatter on the recommendation of two dear friends.