Why October Through January Is My Happy Place

Everybody’s got a season they wait all year for, and I’ve noticed most people mean summer. The beach, the long light, the tomatoes (okay, I’ll give them the tomatoes). But if you ask me when I feel most like myself, most alive, most here, the answer is the exact stretch of the calendar a lot of folks dread: October first through the end of January. The dark half. The cold half. My half.

It is not a coincidence that it ends on my birthday, January 28th. I’ve come to think of the whole run as one long, slow, glorious exhale that starts when the light goes gold in October and finishes with a piece of cake in the dead of winter. Four months of everything I love about being a person who cooks and gathers and lives in a house full of animals. Let me tell you why.

It starts with the kitchen waking up. Summer cooking, for me, is a series of negotiations with the heat; you cook fast, you cook outside, you try not to turn the oven on and heat the whole house to a rolling boil. But come October, the oven becomes my friend again. The house wants to smell like something braising. The Kamado stops being a fast-sear machine and becomes a low-and-slow, all-day, tend-the-fire meditation. Soups come back. Chili comes back. The big pot on the back of the stove that just simmers all afternoon and makes the whole downstairs feel like a hug, that comes back. Cold weather gives you permission to cook the slow, patient, deeply-flavored things, and patient food is my favorite kind of food.

And the garden, which owns me completely from March to September, finally lets me rest. This year it mostly just owned me: the beds were a bust, and my summer went to pulling Japanese stiltgrass by the armload. But fall is when I get to start hoping again. My first-ever saffron crocus went into a half-barrel by the front door last weekend, and the collards are in the ground with a real shot at making the Christmas and New Year’s table. The frantic keeping-things-alive of high summer gives way to leaf-raking and quiet. I love my garden like a demanding child, and I love it even more for the few months a year it stops needing me.

October is also when we travel. When we take a big trip, the seven-to-fourteen-day kind, we take it in October, and we have for years. Most places are still open, the kids are back in school, the crowds thin out, and the weather stops being something you check and starts being part of the trip.

Then, of course, there’s Halloween, which is where I stop pretending to be a reasonable adult.

I will be honest with you, the way I’m always honest with you: the Halloween production at our house is mine. It is not Zach’s. He is a wonderful man who enjoys the fruits of it and helps haul the bins out of the crawl space, but the full graveyard in the front garden, the ring of ghosts standing watch around a flickering “fire,” the giant spiders climbing the windows, the Hedge Monster glaring out of the shrubbery by the front door, all of that is me, gleefully, every single year. I don’t even do a costume, not really; I put on black leggings, a dark shirt, and some kind of Mardi Gras mask, and I hand out the good candy (full-size, I will not be taking questions) and jello shots for the grown-ups and Greenies for anybody who shows up with a dog. It is the one day a year I get to be completely, unapologetically extra, and I look forward to it like a kid.

After that the holidays come one right after another, and every one of them is, at its heart, about the same thing: a table with people around it.

Thanksgiving is nine pies for seven people, which is a whole essay of its own, but the short version is that I make a specific pie for every specific person I love, and the excess is the point. Then Hanukkah rolls in, and I get to make latkes and kugel for Ari, which is one of my favorite kinds of cooking, feeding someone well on their own terms, so they feel like they belong at your table, because they do. Christmas I love with my whole chest despite being a card-carrying atheist, because the version of Christmas I believe in was never about the theology; it was always about the cookies and the people and the lights against the longest nights of the year. And then New Year, and the quiet week, and the soups, and finally, at the very end of it, my birthday.

Here’s the part I think people miss about the dark half of the year, the part that took me a while to understand myself: the cold and the early dark are not the price of admission. They’re the whole point. You cannot have candlelight without dark to put it against. You cannot have the specific, bone-deep comfort of a warm kitchen and a full table unless it’s genuinely cold and genuinely dark outside the window. The season gives you permission to slow down, to stay in, to light something and stir something and pull people close. Summer scatters everybody to the four winds; winter gathers them back to the fire. I am, at my core, a gatherer.

I’d be lying if I told you it was all warmth and cinnamon, though. This season is also thick with the people who aren’t at the table anymore: Meemaw and Nana, Carol and Sharon, the women who taught me most of what I know about feeding people, who live now mostly in the recipes and the muscle memory. You don’t get to my age cooking these particular holidays without setting a place, in your head, for a few ghosts of your own. But I’ve made my peace with that, and honestly it’s part of why I hold the season so close. The pies and the biscuits and the whole loud, overstuffed table are how I keep those folks at dinner. Cooking is just remembering with your hands.

So that’s why. From the first gold light of October to the piece of cake at the end of January, this is the stretch where everything I care about, food, family, the animals underfoot, the house full and warm against the cold, all lines up at once. Four months of my favorite version of my own life.

And then February comes, and I blink out into the lengthening light like a mole who’s been underground too long, a little dazed, a little wistful, already counting. It’s fine. It comes back around every year. It always does.

Pull up a chair. It’s my season, and there’s plenty of room.

P.S. Yes, the Halloween decorations spend eleven months a year split between the crawl space and a storage unit down the street, and yes, they take up an amount of space that Zach has, on occasion, gently mentioned. New storage bins are on my list, and then it all moves into the crawl space. He knew what he signed up for. Mostly.

P.P.S. If your happy place is July and the beach, I’m genuinely glad for you, and I’ll see you out there for exactly one long weekend before I retreat back to the shade and start counting down to October.