The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock treeHas given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
– Robert Frost
A snow-poem and colour scheme, just in time for Solstice.
Random mythology time! (Because that’s the kind of nerd i am.) Solstice being the shortest day of the year is often tied in mythology to the day when the sun/light/etc. begins to return, and many Solstice myths and traditions reflect this. The rebirth of the Sun God, the day when the Oak King (who rules the light half of the year) defeats the Holly King (who rules the dark half of the year) – even Christmas, which is technically based on a Bible story but in the details is all about a God being born in human form in order to bring light to the world. I’ve even heard one where Solstice is ‘when the Sun starts coming back from vacation’. (Also Sun told the trees he was going on holiday, but when he didn’t come back quickly enough they started wailing and shedding their leaves in mourning. Only the evergreen trees maintained faith the Sun would come back.)
One legend holds Solstice is a time ruled by the Raven (specifically Raven, not Crow, but Raven is a species of Crow so shhhh, we’ll pretend the poem still works for this). The legend holds at one time, the entire world was in darkness, with all the light in the universe kept in a box by an old man. When Raven discovered the old man was keeping all the light, he decided to steal it, and while it took a good bit of trickery to get into the man’s hut (the versions i’ve seen involve disguising himself as a hemlock needle, floating in the man’s daughter’s water until she swallowed him, and then turning himself into a baby – there seems to be no damn mythology on this earth which does not eventually involve a woman being impregnated against her will, which is a few steps past creepy, but i digress), he did eventually make it into the hut and was able to steal the light and bring it to the rest of the world.