Winter: The Story of a Season For those of us in the very northern or very southern parts of the world, winter can be a difficult season to love. The long nights and dreary weather are wearing on the mind and body, making many want to do nothing more than curl up in bed and hibernate until the light returns. But winter can be a time of warmth and community If we want it to be. There are plenty of holidays and traditions that have come down to us through the years, and in her newest book of short essays, Winter: The Story of a Season, Val McDermid talks about her experiences with these traditions as she has experienced them through the decades of her life in Scotland. It is not a chronological retelling of Christmas and Burns Nights past, though. The book opens with a description of her current writing room and the trees she can see out of her window, and how Storm Éowyn came blowing through to wreak havoc across the country, after which the sun came out to brighten the next day. ‘Janus-faced’, she calls the season precisely because of this duality. Of course, the rest of the seasons can be just as two-faced but the bright days of winter seem especially bright because they are so fleeting. When the daylight hours number six or seven at most, those long stretches of night seem extra ominous. Add in the extreme cold, and it’s no wonder that the so-called ‘nordic-noir’ strain of crime novels McDermid and other northerly authors are known for feels like an entirely different genre from the standard police procedural. A landscape covered in snow and darkness hits differently from a sunny green hillside or city park. Enough of the grimness of the season, though. There are plenty of things to celebrate, and McDermid devotes most of the book to winter’s brighter side– particularly the holidays and their surrounding festivities. We’re treated to stories of holidays past, which all have a balance of sentimentality and acknowledgement of the realities of her childhood. McDermid’s family did not have a lot of money, but her parents did their best to make the season festive and memorable. In her discussion of Hallow’en McDermid describes how she and and a friend went to a costume party dressed as the thing that scared them most: Perthshire Tories. They won the costume prize that year. Despite all the holiday cheer, McDermid does have some laments– namely, the fact that so many of the old traditions have become heavily commercialized. Once, there would be New Year’s celebrations in the town square, but now many of them require expensive tickets to attend, which prevents many local residents from celebrating in their own communities. First Footing celebrations are few and far between these days, though they used to be incredibly common. This isn’t to say that McDermid is being a curmudgeon about the present and yearning for bygone days. She’s just clear-eyed about the realities of present celebrations and the difficulties of keeping some of the older traditions alive, given how the world has changed since she was a child. Times change, and our traditions change with them. Winter: The Story of a Season is a lovely book overflowing with reasons to love the coldest season of the year. McDermid’s clear and elegant writing provides a charming look back at her family and her country’s winter traditions, and gives us a reason to celebrate the short days and long nights. Winter’s beauty is stark and sometimes hard to find, but it’s there all the same. Our traditions might look different from how they did when we were children, but that doesn’t make them worse, just different. And if we adjust our perspective a little, we might find that winter can be the warmest season of all. Thank you to NetGalley and Atlantic Monthly Press for the free advance copy for review. Traveling in Books is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Traveling in Books that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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Sunday, 14 December 2025
Book Review: Winter, The Story of a Season
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