When I was growing up, my family adhered pretty strictly to the “no Christmas music” before Thanksgiving rule, and as a parent I’ve tried to maintain it as well. It is one small way to push back against Christmas creep. I love the holiday season, but one thing that makes it special is that it is a clearly defined time, and hearing “Jingle Bells” in early November just doesn’t sit right.
As kids, we did have one significant exception to the holiday music rule, and it is a tradition I have adhered to with more rigor than just about any other for close to four decades. Every year, whenever the first snowflakes of the year started to fall, we would put on the album “Winter’s Coming Home: Songs To Celebrate Winter and Christmas,” recorded in 1975 by the Monks of Weston Priory, a Benedictine monastery in Vermont.
I know of no music that better captures the feel of the transition from fall to actual winter. The date of the first snowfall will of course change from year to year — sometimes it happens in early October; these days it’s more likely to be mid to late November. There have been years when it hasn’t happened until after Thanksgiving, which always makes the world feel slightly off-kilter to me. But whenever it happens, we greet it with side A, track 1: “Winter’s Coming Home.” The coziness of the guitars and the mellow baritone of the soloist intoning “Summer’s gone, leaves are falling down and round my window, crystal clear and certain that winter’s coming home,” before the entire choir joins in on the refrain, signals that one season is over, and another has officially begun.
It is, of course, unlikely that the sound of monks singing a simple melody over spare instrumentation will evoke for you the same nostalgia and deep peace that it does for me. My response has been wired over decades of ritual. But this is part of the point of any of this — Advent, ritual, religious practice: to create systems that help us to be aware of the movement of time, and the rhythms of grace. The first snowfall is a blessing of sorts: a tangible reminder that nothing lasts, and that, indeed, summer is now gone, and so it is time to sit by the “fire of brother’s love,” and welcome the peace of winter back into our lives.
