Pilgrim's Perch

January can be a dull and dreary month in the northern hemisphere. The festive fun of Christmas is over and maybe we all feel a bit sluggish…

Many folk suffer from SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, and this can be very disabling. We need to take steps to minimise this so that we can look after ourselves, safeguard our health and enhance our sense of wellbeing.

Getting out into natural daylight as much as we can is so important at this time of the year. A brief walk round the block, through the park, or into the garden can help enormously. You may think it’s too early to look for signs of spring but – look more closely. Many plants will be sending up tentative shoots and some will even be in flower.

One of my favourites is the tiny but brilliantly coloured golden aconite. This is one of the most early flowering plants in the garden – even ahead of crocus.

The aconite – technical name Eranthis hyemalis likes sun but it grows well in shady patches and under trees. It is part of the buttercup family and its vibrant gold flash comes as a welcome burst of light at a dull time of the year. Like many plants it is poisonous if consumed – so don’t eat it. Just enjoy its brilliance!

The Twelve Days of Christmas run from Christmas Day to the Epiphany, on 6th January, the day on which the Wise Men arrived at the stable in Bethlehem, in search of the new born Saviour, Jesus Christ. It is a time of festivities and partying, taking in New Year celebrations and marking new beginnings. 

Of course, it’s also a time when folk take stock, looking back over the year that’s passed and thinking ahead to the new year just begun, with all its challenges, opportunities and excitement. Perhaps it’s new resolutions that might spur you on to do something different in your way of living – or maybe you want to take time to be thankful for many good things. However you spend this period, may it be a time of hope and optimism as we ring out the old and ring in the new.

As Christmas Eve arrives, let’s take a moment away from the frantic and frenzied preparations for the holiday season and relax with Thomas Hardy’s evocative poem, The Oxen.

The Oxen

Written in 1915, Hardy was inspired to write this poem after sitting one Christmas Eve with other folk by the fire. They imagined the scene on the night that Jesus was born in a stable, surrounded by animals – ox and ass. As if recognising that this was a special birth, the animals knelt at the baby’s crib in homage. But, as if in keeping with the forlorn spirit of the age Hardy introduces a note of world weariness – surely few folk would nowadays believe that such a thing might happen? And yet, sounding a tone of eternal optimism, he states how, if someone were to suggest that ox and ass were kneeling today in homage to the birth of the king, he would willingly make his way to the barn hoping it to be true.

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
 ‘Now they are all on their knees,’
 An elder said as we sat in a flock
 By the embers in hearthside ease.

 We pictured the meek mild creatures where
 They dwelt in their strawy pen,
 Nor did it occur to one of us there
 To doubt they were kneeling then.

 So fair a fancy few would weave
 In these years! Yet, I feel,
 If someone said on Christmas Eve,
 ‘Come; see the oxen kneel,

 ‘In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
 Our childhood used to know,’
 I should go with him in the gloom,
 Hoping it might be so.