Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
The last ultra-cold January we had in Chicago, I got stood up by our brand-new nanny. My husband and I hired Jenny prior to Christmas, and the vibes were all good. But on that Monday after New Year’s 2014, the minutes ticked awkwardly by until we couldn’t keep pretending Jenny had been waylaid by illness or weather. Casting about on Facebook, I found a recent photo of her on a Jamaican beach: glowing, a finger flashing an engagement ring.
All Januarys are brutal, that one just in a memorable way. At least an urgent project filled those barren days: finding child care fast.
January is a tundra of the calendar and the mind. It has at least 31,000 days. The holidays are over: no more tinsel or jolliness or frenetic spending. The month arrives blank and forlorn. Other than some bank holidays and Sunday-night football, it’s largely unpopulated with events and frozen over with difficulty. Winter plunges to its deepest cold in January, and the season is only starting. So why am I a fan?
Because finding emptiness is almost impossible nowadays, even less a kind of emptiness that makes room for itself whether you asked for it or not. Every year January enacts a miracle: It seems to slow down time, in an era when everything feels hysterically sped up.
January throws down its first gauntlet with weather. You need to fill the calendar with reasons to live again—but first you have to prepare. “Winter is not a season; it’s an occupation,” said novelist Sinclair Lewis, and he wasn’t kidding. I moved to Chicago 14 years ago and I’m still learning tricks.
It starts at home. You break out the boot tray and the draft snakes, those skinny pillows that line doorways. Refill the salt buckets. If your windows leak heat, seal them with plastic wrap and a hairdryer. Then there’s clothing. Mittens, not gloves (or retractable mittens over gloves). Wool or down, never cotton. Silk underwear or its common-sense variant: wearing baggy sweatpants over your indoor pants. This year, La Niña returns to Chicago, bringing even colder temperatures and heavier snowfalls, which calls for extra reinforcements. Breathing through a scarf mutes the air’s icy blast. Vaselining your nostrils and cheeks prevents windburn.
If this all sounds like work, it is—but it’s also activity. January’s second gauntlet is torpor, countered only by action. Winter’s chores give you a push. Pity the Angelenos who simply unearth umbrellas for their January rain, the Australians idling away in high summer. At least snowbirds get off the couch post-holidays and back to Florida.
Start facing January easily, with an outdoor walk the weekend after New Year’s. You won’t feel like it, but what else do you have going on? Nothing! You’re bored, your friends are bored, and there’s nothing to look forward to ever again. January unfurls like a blindingly white steppe that stretches over nine time zones. Desperation leads to simplicity, which leads unaccountably to pleasure. Bundled up, a cold-weather jaunt is exhilarating. Winter wants to kill you! Winter would kill you, without the gear and a warm place to retreat to. An inkling of mortality clears the mind, lets it fill with new ideas.
January’s weather is startlingly beautiful. The light’s slant is singular. Every expanse offers a micropalette of whites lit as much from below as above. Lake Michigan freezes over into icy plates that crack and groan under the waves’ ceaseless action; it’s often too noisy to talk over. The wind patterns over the lake whip ice and sand together into alien formations dotting the beaches. When non-Chicagoans ask what I mean by this, I show them a photo: My friend Ezra with our kids standing inside a huge winter cave, whipped into existence by winds and balanced on frozen-solid lake water. Climate change threatens this extremity with disappearance—yet another reason to get out and witness it.
Back indoors, let’s make plans. Beautiful as it is, January is still a trial and a team effort. We need to help each other through it. Forget New Year’s resolutions; January is no time to pressure yourself. You just need to thwart despair. That means livening up your calendar with activities that help you count down the days happily with people you love. Is there any simpler formula for living well?
Which activities, you ask? I like winter-specific ones that don’t require sportiness or gobs of money. Rooftop curling with hot toddies. A staycation at a hotel with an indoor pool. Chicago’s puppet festival, among many other cultural offerings. Saunas, particularly no-fuss ones like King Spa, where you eat Korean food in bathrobes, play cards, watch reruns between massage appointments.
It’s a great month for dreaming ahead, too. Planning gives hope: ordering seeds for the garden, waiting for college acceptances, listing your home for sale. And if you can’t get out of bed, you can always just make a baby. Nine of the 10 most common birthdays occur in September, nine months after January.
Life is hard, and its meaning is open-ended: January presents these facts unvarnished. You can’t forgo challenges forever. But January is already so difficult, it demands you prioritize self-care and solidarity. For one-twelfth of the year time slows to a crawl, and the only job is to power cheerfully through. Turns out we still know how to do that; I’m just grateful for the practice.
