Winter is icumen in, Lhude sing Goddamm Raineth drop and staineth slop and how the wind doth Ramm Sing: Goddamm! —Ezra Pound This parody of the famous 13th century English round “Sumer is Icumen In” perfectly reflects how many of us experience the month of January. It’s cold, it’s wet, it’s dark, and it just…keeps…going. In the mainstream Christian culture, there isn’t a thing to celebrate after New Year except for a couple of long “official” weekends with little if any widely acknowledged ceremonial significance, until Easter in March or April*. That’s a very long drought between celebrations. Pagans get a Sabbath at the beginning of February, commonly called Imbolc…

January is a hard damned month for me. There, I said it. After the colorful lights and parties and presents and many festivities of Yule comes a dark, cold time when we all go back to work. No fun for us now: just trudging through the snow or freezing rain, in the dark, to and from our obligations. It’s the longest, most miserable month of the year. Here where I live, in the wine country north of San Francisco, January is a time when the hills are green from whatever rain we’ve had thus far (not much yet, this year), and rain is typically common. We’ve had flooding in January…