Winter is the coldest time of the year. The days are shorter, and the nights are longer. Deciduous trees are bare of leaves, and some animals hibernate. Christmas is celebrated, one year comes to an end, and a new year begins.

In The Stillness of Winter, nationally known journalist and author Barbara Mahany unfurls month by month the winter season exploring the natural world to find the holy within and the holy all around during this sacred season. Expanding on content from Barbara’s book Slowing Time, this beautiful two-color gift book is part almanac, scrapbook, field notes, and recipe box, showing readers how to experience the winter world around them with joy and curiosity.

A spiritual guide to the winter season.
Features short entries for daily reading.
Hardcover gift book with 2-color interior and ribbon.

Excerpt

December Field Notes

In this darkest month, when the solstice marks the sun’s lowest point in the year, and night stretches to its longest, ancient peoples feared the solar light might never be kindled again. Back in pagan Scandinavia, Nordic merrymakers lit up Juul logs, slugged back mead, tended fires all night long. Romans got downright riotous, decking halls with rosemary and laurel, burning lamps through the night, carrying on crazily, in hopes of warding off the spirits of darkness. And the Incas went so far as to try to tie the sun to a hitching post, a great stone column, to keep it from escaping altogether. Nowadays, trusting in the dawn, we needn’t be afraid. Rather, longest night beckons quietude.

*Full Cold Moon, or Long Night Moon, lights the long, long night. Even more so, because with the sun so low across the sky, winter moon arcs higher, and takes longer than during the rest of the year to cross the night sky.

*The guiding star in this night sky is not the biblical star of Bethlehem. Rather, Orion, the hunter, and Gemini, the twins, move to center stage as winter begins. And all the darkness brings its own reward: a nighttime canvas stitched in deep-sky splendor. Double and triple stars abound, each a celestial wonder—among the most glorious of the astronomical calendar.

*It’s not all ice and snow blanketing crust of Earth; rainy season begins in the Pacific Northwest. And woods aren’t wholly barren, with sumac and bittersweet berries staying ripe through the winter, ready fuel for the famished. Bald eagles soar in from up north, for milder overwintering. Great Horned Owls pair up and fashion love songs as they do so. Chipmunks go underground for the long winter’s nap. But fox and gray squirrel fancy all the roaming room and make the best of it with Mother Nature’s call to mate.

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About the Author

Author and journalist Barbara Mahany writes about stumbling on the sacred amid the cacophony of the modern-day domestic melee for publications, including The New York Times Book Review, America magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and more. For 30 years, she was a writer at the Chicago Tribune, and before that a pediatric oncology nurse at Children's Memorial Hospital. Her first book, Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door, was named by Publishers Weekly as one of their Top 10 religion books for Fall 2014. She and her husband, the Tribune's Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, Blair Kamin, have two sons. For further information regarding Barbara Mahany, visit: BarbaraMahany.com.