wishlist from the winter's dark

The winter solstice is here. The day is cloistered and pinned in, shorn to its shortest life, and in its place the night and dream is made king and kingdom. This is Yule, the heart-cavity of winter. This is the honouring of the blessed and frightful dark into which the world’s whole sap is sunk. And from out of the long midnight of the year come the gleam of the wish.

⭒ ༺♱ ｡ 𐙚 ༻ ⭒

I desire many things with my stomach instead of my spirit. Still, I am innocent and pure in Paris.

– ‘is fashion allowed in heaven?’ by Mapi Mariposa

As a young girl, I used to make lists out of the words I liked from my books. I wrote in pencil on printer paper, page after page, a lexicon of girl-materiality: pearl, ballet-slipper, seraphim, silky, musing, midwinter… These were wishlists, ‘lists of desired things’, which doubled as a form of collecting, or shopping.† Words were not merely vessels for meaning but artefacts in themselves, containing a kind of prelapsarian essence where transcribing the word felt to be in some sense also a possession of the aspect or article it gestured towards.

I am reading these books of my childhood again, as I tend to do at Christmastide, and finding that they themselves come down to this same subject: the girl, lost in winter, who wishes so hard it takes on its own sort of reality. She is devoted to making herself a dreamscape in which she may live, and to do she makes an inventory of all the things that will make it beautiful.

This is the marrow of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, White Boots by Noel Streatfield, The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden, every Jacqueline Wilson and Cathy Cassidy novel… And most of all, A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Sara Crewe survives by pretence, listing ‘all the beauties she was making herself see’ in her bare attic room:

there could be a thick, soft blue Indian rug on the floor… a fur rug before the fire, and hangings on the wall... a lamp with a deep rose-colored shade; and a table in the middle, with things to have tea with… and the bed could be… made soft and covered with a lovely silk coverlet. It could be beautiful.

⭒ ♱ ༺ ｡ ༻ ♰⭒

I think there is something spiritual at the root of the wishlist. It is a kind of faith. Wishing must be as old as prayer, as the articulation of want; the form of the wishlist is merely its organised expression.

This is not the wishlist as the vampire progeny of modern consumerism, a symptom of the dead, unending want of those things flogged by influencer advertisement (the desire to own a dozen Stanley cups in the same colour…).

Rather, this is the wishlist as a praxis of fantasy. Wishlist as window shopping — a bloodletting of desire, where pleasure is gleaned not from acquisition but from taking the word and transmuting it into a real thing inside the dollhouse of the head. An immaculate conception, without flesh, like the bringing to life of the limp doll through make-believe. Wishlist as the soft bedding of the daydream, pure because of its unreality, not-yet-realised.

⭒ ༺ 𝜗𝜚 ࣪˖˚₊۶ৎ˙⋆ ｡༻ ⭒

from my own wishlist, dredged up from the mud of the twenty-fourth winter of my life:

…Silk ribbons, silver boots to tramp around in the woods with, a weapon for my bedside, books in excess. A red velvet cape with fur at the hood. An aviary with doves that come to me when I call, a medieval chapel, compline every Wednesday like I used to go to with Maïa in Cambridge. A pair of guardian angels that speak back to me when I light a candle. A Chloé Paddington bag. Locks of hair from every friend to keep in a little satin reliquary-book. An armoire that is not broken. A rabbit’s foot to keep in my pocket and a Shetland pony to keep as a friend. To have my innocence returned to me and for everyone I have ever loved to still be alive…

⭒ ♱ ༺ ｡ ༻ ♰⭒

Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year’s, and the day’s deep midnight is.

— from ‘A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day’, John Donne

Winter is negative space. It is begot of absence, darkness, death: things which are not. You wake into a morning that is empty of light, and your dreams lurk just beyond understanding. There is something without a name that is waiting at the foot of your bed, waiting to catch your eye. It is something a little like fear, or despair. You won’t look at it. You fall back asleep and wish for the return of the sun as you do so.

Winter is the season of the animal, and thus simplicity: we are whittled down by the cold and dark, reduced to our basic needs of shelter and sustenance. Winter harks to the austerity of a medieval landscape, the frost-barren field under an endless night and a chill that seeps through your furs and into your bones.

Winter amounts to survival. We are brought to our knees with fatigue. So the hibernating bear does not dream of Stanley cups in its cave; the bear has no wishlist at all.

But we make poor animals, too spoiled and full up of useless longing. We need the cultivation of the wishlist. We need to want something frivolous and lovely to ornament the spirit. This has something of the Nativity-scene in it: the gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh brought to the lamb-child in the lowly stable. The story of the coming of the Messiah is a story of the refugee.

Only winter could be the setting for Hans Christian Anderson’s ‘The Little Match Girl’, who dreams of the comfort of the warm meal and family around the hearth, found in the flame of the matchstick. Only the poverty of winter could make necessary, and so vivid, the sanctuary of the dream.

Winter makes necessary the wishlist, and clear its sanctity.

⭒ ༺ 𝜗𝜚 ࣪˖ ִ𐙚 ｡༻ ⭒

Out of this darkness comes our winter rituals, which are exercises in wishing. Unknowingly, we return to the comforts of the apotropaic — we cut down a tree down and stand it in the hall of the home, ornament it with candles and ribbons and gingerbread. We hang mistletoe above and line boughs of holly and ivy over the tables to prepare for the yuletide feast. Turning the outside-in, welcoming the pagan wild into our homes, giving the Other a place at our hearth: this is wish-making, a request for safety in the year to come.

It is the carnivalesque of the Lord of Misrule. Remember the warnings of ‘Gawain and the Green Knight’, which begins at the Christmas feast of King Arthur’s court, where out of fear a festive game is misinterpreted as violence.

Christmas decoration are protective charms and emblems, certainly, but they also represent the thinning veil between the mundane and the mystical. The bûche de Noël, where sugar mimics snow and chocolate mimics bark. The advent calendar, glittering, hiding scenes within itself. The Nutcracker and the land of the Sugar Plum Fairy, the land of snowflakes, the turkish delight of the Snow Queen. The child’s boot placed by the door, or a stocking at the end of a bed for a Saint to fill with sweets. Building a home and hearth in miniature with slabs of gingerbread, decorated with white icing birds. The sugar mouse scavenging at the cheese board.

⭒ ༺♱ ｡ ♰༻ ⭒

I remember my wishes for the solstice of two years ago, spent as a muddy pilgrim asleep under the doom mural of Chaldon church:

Blessed be the sacrifice! Blessed be the lamb! Blessed be the welcoming of the darkness, and the coming of the sun!

It is time to let go of the things that quietly fester within one. Bring it into the light, as the days start to linger once more, and let it dissipate. Turn the movements of the year into ceremony, consecrate the cosmic rhythms and know that we are both very big and very small.

Merry Christmas, Merry Yule, Merry Wintertime! May your days be gentle and warm.

They stand true, now, two years on.

† collecting vs shopping: a funny semantic distinction… I work with a foot in the art world, which deals in the masculine art of collecting. This has the seriousness of a religion, strictly separated from the girlish hobby of shopping…

*all the images my own, except the first two (source unknown).

⭒ ♱ ༺ ｡ ༻ ♰⭒

𝔴𝔦𝔱𝔥 𝔩𝔬𝔳𝔢,

𝔄𝔫𝔫𝔞 𝔊𝔦𝔰𝔢𝔩𝔩𝔢 𝔡𝔢 𝔚𝔞𝔞𝔩

@anna.c.dewaal & @lunulae.archive 𓇢𓆸