When I was a kid and saw various versions of A Christmas Carol on the TV featuring scenes of old-timey Christmastime London (51.51° N), like the street outside Scrooge and Marley’s or Bob Cratchit at his standing desk, I remember marveling at how dark it was even in the afternoon. (And I knew it was afternoon because Scrooge kept saying, “Good afternoon!”) I grew up in Maryland (39.29° N), and it certainly gets cold there in the wintertime (and godawful miserably humid hot in the summer), but it wasn’t until I lived through a winter in the Pacific Northwest (47.61° N) that I understood fully about this kind of darkness. Come December, the edges of the night here squeeze in on both sides and gloom takes over. (As I write this at 8:15 AM it is dark and raining, and it will rain on through the dark day without cease. There will not come an hour I won’t need to turn a light on to read.) Here’s how I describe it in my novel Seattle Trust:
Seattle slowly circles December’s drain. Days will now march past like lumbering ghosts, as the border between day and night softens like bruising fruit into a barely varying sameness. Gray in/gray out.
I count on the Christmas season to boost me through until the Solstice, when the days start getting longer again. Usually, by the middle to end of January, I start feeling the light gently seeping back. But until then, the “artificial light” of art in all its forms: Christmas trees, and music, and plays, has to do the heavy lifting of my soul.
So yeah, one reason (reason number four, to be exact) that I’m going back to the theatre, is because…
“I need a little Christmas. Right this very minute.”