S.N.O.W.: Strategies for Staying Sane During Winter

Sometimes, maintaining sanity
requires doing something crazy.

We opened the blinds to see what the morning held. Snow was falling for third time in a week. Of course, snow was better than cold. One week we didn’t leave the house for five days. We didn’t even go to the garbage can, but left the bags of trash to freeze in the garage. On day six, the danger of instant frostbite passed so I bundled up to venture out for groceries. It had warmed up to -4* F.

Does it sound crazy to you to live in a place where this is typical of winter? It sounds crazy to me. Why do we live here? I ask myself. Of course, I know why: family, grandparents, cousins, nannies, friends, church, etc. We settle for winter because we love our community. Still, when the temperature plummets or another storm delivers two more inches of slush on the roads, it takes more than the love of relatives to keep from being buried alive by winter blues. Maintaining even a semblance of cheerful sanity takes intentionality and creativity—strategy. It takes S.N.O.W. 

S—Study: Not classroom work, but delight-filled learning. When you hear winter moans begin, ask: “Why did God make winter?” Then gather your kids, pull out your computer and your library card and search for answers. What makes winter important? How does it work? Look for God’s wise design in winter. “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them. Full of splendor and majesty is his work, and his righteousness endures forever” (Psalm 111:2-3).

• Watch a video clip about how snowflakes form. Cut out your own snowflakes.
• Read a book about animals inhabiting earth’s polar regions. How are they uniquely designed?
• Examine the frost on your windows. Can you replicate it?
• Learn about the people who live inside the Arctic Circle. How do they survive?

One of our favorite cold snap activities is to watch “Frozen Planet.” Though not presented from a Christian perspective, the science shows forth the intricate design and care of God over His creatures (including people!) living in coldest climates.

How does frost form in such delicate patterns?

N—Nest: We have an extended forecast available to warn us of foul weather. Mamas, we must take a lesson from the ants: “Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest” (Proverbs 6:7-8). Contentedness in the winter is possible, but it takes forethought. We need to be like the virtuous woman: “She is not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household are clothed in scarlet” (Proverbs 31:21). Make home ready to be a place of contented play and rest.

• Prep your pantry with ingredients for special projects and warm your home with cooking. Gather up your family and together bake bread, make homemade pizza, simmer some soup, mix up some cookies, or try making candy.
• Select and gather supplies for a new skill you could learn as a family: candle-making, soap-making, sewing, knitting, carving, or building. Find new ways to use your hands and time.
• Stock up on craft supplies: paper, glue, tape, felt, yarn, and coloring/painting supplies. Give your kids cardboard boxes, cardboard tubes, and egg cartons specifically for creative purposes. If they run out of ideas, get some craft books from your library for them to look through.
• Check out books and audio books by the wagon load. Put piles of books next to sofas heaped with blankets. Find chapter books to read aloud together. If you can’t think of some good titles, ask other moms who you know to be readers for their favorite titles.
• Pull out board games and jigsaw puzzles. Set up a card table specifically for puzzling. Sit down with your kids for some relaxing fun.

My kids love to spend a cold winter day strewn around the living room with their sketchbooks or Legos or puzzles listening to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle or Winnie-the-Pooh.  Remember those five days of polar freeze when no one left our home? We survived on a full pantry, craft supplies, library books, and bed sheets turned into hammocks hung from the dining room table. Puzzles and Laura Ingalls Wilder books on audio CD got us through a month of snowstorms.

Just hanging in there in our hammocks....

O—Open your door...

…and let someone in! Why not ask someone else to come over and bounce off the walls with you? Time for messy house hospitality. After all, no mom really cares what your house looks like if it means an opportunity to leave her own. While the kids play together you can share laughs. “Anxiety in a man's heart weighs him down, but a good word makes him glad” (Proverbs 12:25). Winter doesn’t have to be lonely. Invite a friend in and dispel the stress with good words of truth and perspective.

…and go out! Not all cold is lethal. Make sure you have good outdoor gear ready for everyone, including yourself, and lead the charge to get outside. Find local nature parks that offer winter activities. Load up a backpack with snacks and hit the trail with some friends. Company and food lessen grumbling. Hang out it your yard. If it gets dark too early, bring out glow sticks. If the kids get too hot in their play, bring out popsicles. Shovel paths, construct forts, build snowman, dig tunnels, and throw snowballs. My boys love a snowball fight against mommy. Join the kids in their play, and teach them you never grow too old to delight in God’s work.

Sometimes the best cheering up is a friend
to venture through winter with you--
especially if they stop to count the passing train cars for you.

A sunny snowbank is the perfect place
to eat a popsicle.

 

W—Wonder. Orchestrate unique and beautiful encounters for your family with this winter God has made.

• Bundle up and take a moonlit hike in the woods.
• During a snowfall, try to catch falling snowflakes on a piece of black paper and look at their designs under a magnifying glass before they melt.
• Look out the window on a cloudless day and be dazzled by the brightness of the landscape.
• Take advantage of the early sunset to go out stargazing—even in your own yard.

As you look around you, meditate on the beauty of God in His creation. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1).

This too shall melt. Enjoy the beauty while it lasts.

 

Winter can be long and gray—but it doesn’t have to be endlessly dreary. Sanity isn’t to be found in the forecast, but in a steadfast trust in the sovereignty of our loving God. Hold tightly to His lordship, and then persevere in finding ways to delight in His work and provision. Study His creation and how it works. Nest ahead to prepare a cheerful home from which to face the season’s icy blasts. Open your door to the warm fellowship of friends—or, better yet, invite your friends to join you outside to enjoy the fresh air. Wonder at God’s handiwork, beauty, power, and mercy. Turn to Him in worship and trust Him for the grace to face one more winter day.

Snowbound or So Blessed? My Winter Heart-Check

Sometimes, we just feel stuck...

Every year as I shiver under a pile of blankets, my husband asks something like, “Wouldn’t you like to be on a beach right now?” “No,” I answer. While he was only teasing, he still accuses me of being masochistic. I point out the logistics of such a venture with four our kids, and we add more blankets to the pile. But this year I realized something: even if it were easy to manage, I still wouldn’t choose a yearly retreat each winter.

Why? Why choose to stay in winter? I suppose part of it has to do with how you view winter. Consider what God promised to Noah back when He painted the first rainbow across the sky:

“[T]he Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:21b-22, emphasis added)

Winter is part of a promise. It’s a season God created (Psalm 74:17), sustains, and sends as evidence of His faithfulness. Even so, how often do we dare to perceive it as such? Rainbows are beautiful reminders of God’s mercy. But snow?

Most of my life, winter didn’t come with a break. When it got colder, we put on more layers. When our 1920s radiators weren’t enough to fight the drafts, we put our dogs under the blankets with us. My parents may have desired a warm vacation, but Florida wasn’t in the budget. Instead, we went to the tropics exhibit at the zoo. Mostly, we came to understand that winter was a part of life. We all had fits of grumbling, but there it was. We couldn’t hibernate during it. We couldn’t fly away from it. Only one option remained: go through it.

We did. More than that, with my parents’ help, I learned to look for the unique blessings and rhythm of the season. For a kid in the inner city, winter had benefits. For a few months, a beautiful blanket of snow hid the crumbling asphalt. Abandoned parking lots became glittering fields for dog sled runs. There was quiet. No drug dealers or prostitutes roamed the sidewalks. There was peace. The earlier sunsets, cold temperatures, and snow were perfect excuses not to stay out late in the evening, but to enjoy more time at home and turn in early with a good book. Winter was like a freshly-washed sheet God used to tuck in a child over-wrought from all his warm-weather work and play. It was rest. Winter meant curling up in my armchair and sipping cocoa while listening to Tchaikovsky or piecing together jigsaw puzzles at the dining room table. It was a season of simple contentment.

That was my childhood. Now I share winter with four young children and the season sometimes involves more war than peace when a polar vortex keeps us inside day after day after day. Even now Lego structures, magnet tile mansions, and blanket forts fill the house. Somehow the kids avoid bouncing them down even while trampling the unsuspecting parent who dares to cross the racetrack to fetch food out of the fridge. There are beautiful days when the temperature rises above 15* and everyone bundles up in a complicated layering of snow pants, jackets, boots, hats, and mittens. Once my polar explorers finally totter out the door, I might get a peaceful 20 minutes. If the snow is right for sculpting, I may get over an hour. But there are days when they stomp back inside after 15 minutes declaring it is too cold outside and start dumping gear all over the floor. That’s when it begins to feel there is no escape.

The question I must ask myself at this point is, “does there need to be an escape?” What about winter makes me deserve an escape? Maybe it is uncomfortable, but has God failed to supply us with what we need? Perhaps what needs to change isn’t my location or circumstance, but my attitude.

That’s the heart of the issue: attitude. I don’t have a problem with sunshine and warmth, and I strongly support going on family vacations. There are lots of good reasons to travel south during the winter and those who get the chance to should thank God for His good gift. Maybe someday we will travel south too, but not every year. Here’s why: when we build a yearly ritual into our calendar, we are constructing a habit.

Habits aren’t always bad, but they can feed attitudes. Consider if I get into a pattern of telling myself that when I feel stuck in a place that’s uncomfortable and inconvenient, it’s okay to get away from it. The circumstance doesn’t have to be winter. It could just be the ordinary grind of stay-at-home-mom life. I love my kids—but I also crave time away from them and their craziness. Anytime their grandparents offer to take them, the kids are available and I make my plans. While the break itself is innocent, that attitude of entitled escape can become an expectation in my own soul. Soon enough, I fixate on getting an escape and stop looking for God’s grace at work in and around me. Instead of trusting the Good Shepherd for His wise provision, I start looking for circumstances I think would be better pastures. But the fact of the matter is that His sovereign love has placed me here, at home with kids in winter. Consider Psalm 139:16b: “in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” Every one of them—even cold and crazy days. What if instead of looking for a way to escape, I said to my soul, “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24), and then looked for reasons to be glad in it?

The saying is “bloom where you’re planted.” In Minnesota, that includes blooming in winter. This season isn’t our enemy; it’s a season from God. God is still on the throne of heaven commanding an unchanging sequence of seasons because of His mercy toward His creation. He will not leave us in winter forever, just long enough to do us good. To everything there is a season, and the unwavering hope in every season is that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). As snowflakes fall, may we train our hearts to see the glory He is revealing to us instead of merely looking for something “greener.” May we find our contentment in His provision, our peace in His perfect plans for us, and our hope in knowing He who sends snow will also send spring.