If Autumn Comes, Can Christmas Be Far Behind?

Since February this year, I have been working in the Sue Ryder shop in Shepton Mallet.  Over the last few years, my emotional stability hasn’t been up to keeping a job.  I had been enjoying working in Shepton Community Bookshop, but after I started an argument about the theology espoused in one of the books in the religion section, and frightened a customer, I wasn’t asked to come back.

So it is a mark of how much my sanity has improved that I have managed to stick with Sue Ryder and another voluntary job (washing cups at the Oakleaf Community Café) without storming out after an argument with my boss.  Once I had learned not to take my role too seriously, I could stop worrying about my boss’s insistence on arranging children’s books by spine colour rather than by author or theme or age group, and just enjoy the pretty rainbow pattern of the books.

One point that working in a shop has forcefully driven home to me is how crazy the calendar of retail is.  I had already been aware of this, with Christmas treats for sale in the supermarket with best-before dates in November.  But the shop I now work in takes this to a whole new level.

We had a Christmas display in July, because the stockroom was so full of Christmas-themed items – both donated second-hand books and DVDs with a Christmassy setting, and new Christmas decorations and novelties sent to us by a big business that can’t sell its surplus stock.  We hung up red and green tissue-paper stars to celebrate the miracle of an extra Christmas in the year.

Of course, those decorations came down in the autumn, so that in September, we could start decorating for Hallowe’en.  The shop was covered in model pumpkins and plastic spiders trailing artificial cobwebs.  However, Christmas was coming, and the manager was already organising a Christmas grotto at the back of the shop, full of cuddly toy reindeer and CDs of Christmas carols, all carefully cordoned off so that customers could only look and yearn but not buy anything in there yet.

I had to take a few days off at the start of October.  When I came back, I found that now that it was October, the Hallowe’en display had gone from the front window, which was now full of wedding dresses.  Inside, a cuddly Frankenstein’s Monster and an inflatable haunted tree were nearly all that remained of the Hallowe’en display, but the Christmas grotto was now open.  In fairness, after a week or two we restored Hallowe’en together with wedding dresses in a window display of ‘Corpse Bride’ style dresses with angel wings.

Now, in some ways I don’t mind starting to get excited about Christmas early.  I’ve caught myself humming ‘People, Look East’ already.  This was going to be a post about why I think Advent should be longer, instead of just the three-and-a-bit weeks before Christmas.

But it seems a shame to rush into even Advent without taking time to appreciate autumn.  Not just Hallowe’en, or Samhain if you’re pagan, but the glory of the whole season.  The world is turning red, with ripe apples on the trees,

red berries in the hedges from haws to rosehips

to bryony vine

(not to mention yew, which, weirdly, is a conifer that bears berries instead of cones),

and leaves glowing like a magnificent sunset before the darkness of winter.

Okay, for every beautiful bright autumn day, perhaps warm and sunny or perhaps crisp with an early frost, we have many more when it pours with rain for most of the day.  This is to be expected, even if, living in a wet country, we don’t appreciate water as much as we should.

My friend Doom Metal Singer argues that, instead of counting September to November as autumn, December to February as winter, and so on, it would be more logical to take the cross-quarter days between the solstices and equinoxes as the marker points between the seasons.  By this system, autumn runs from Lughnasadh (1 August) to Samhain (1 November), with Mabon, the autumn equinox, in the middle, and then winter runs from  Samhain (1 November) to Imbolc (1 February).

I can see that this Wheel of the Year approach makes sense in terms of what the Earth is doing in relation to the sun.  In terms of average weather patterns in this part of Somerset, however, I sometimes think that it would be more practical to designate July to September as Hot Season, October to December as Wet Season, January to March as Cold Season, and April to June as Dry(ish) Season.  Different parts of Britain have different weather patterns, but one feature they have in common is that April is the driest month in most areas, and October is the wettest almost everywhere (usually with December or August or both as close runners-up), with February the snowiest.

Along with autumnal cloud and rain, of course, come autumnal mists.  On a bright day, you can see the Westbury White Horse from the top of Ash Lane.  On a day like today, you can’t even see the hill that the Horse is carved on.  So I will leave you, not with Eleanor Farjeon gazing east across bare furrows and frozen birds to the star over Bethlehem, but with John Keats:

 

 

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
    For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
  Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
  Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
    Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
  Steady thy laden head across a brook;
  Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
    Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
  Among the river sallows, borne aloft
    Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
  The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.