Do Good Design

I reread Susan Cooper’s classic The Dark Is Rising often, and this year I’ve decided it will have to be every Christmas.She wrote it when living in America and homesick for England, and as any an ex-pat will understand, the book is a wonderfully romanticized vision of old-fashioned and, of course, supernatural, England.The story is about Will Stanton, the youngest of 9 (or 10?) kids, whose 11th birthday is on Midwinter Day, December 22, the winter solstice.All he wants for his birthday is snow, which never comes this early in the year.But this year, he gets his wish, waking up on his birthday to find snow everywhere — and that he’s destined to be the last of the Old Ones in their battle against the Dark.

“And when he looked back through the window, he saw that his own world had gone. In that flash, everything had changed. The snow was there as it had been a moment before, but not piled now on roofs or stretching flat over lawns and fields.

“There were no roofs, there were no fields. There were only trees. Will was looking over a great white forest: a forest of massive trees, sturdy as towers and ancient as rock. They were bare of leaves, clad only in the deep snow that lay untouched along every branch, each smallest twig.”They were everywhere. They began so close to the house that he was looking out through the topmost branches of the nearest tree, could have reached out and shaken them if he had dared to open the window…There was a total silence, as deep and timeless as the blanketing snow; the house and everyone in it lay in a sleep that would not be broken.”"Will was in a Midwinter Day that had been waiting for him to wake into it since the day he had been born, and he somehow knew, for centuries before that.”

The description of Midwinter Day is what sticks in my mind most powerfully, what I summon up as my perfect Christmas morning, when everyone is asleep and it’s just you and the endless, white snow.