Short and sweet: the solstice is a season ripe for ritual

As the solstice descends on the southern hemisphere, I won't be engaging in any gratuitous nude swims, or lighting any sacrificial pyres, but I will be adhering to certain rituals (a loaded term these days) nonetheless.

Whereas summer - if not performing its own frightening version of The Wicker Man/Midsommar denouements - lets us slack off a bit, winter demands our fealty.

Winter insists on all those important little ceremonies because they're a matter of life or death.

Living in a region plagued by frosts, one such ritual is draping those plants lacking the cellular fortitude to greet the reluctant dawn with protective cloth. Everyone around here does it, their hiemal holdings, skeletal and cemeterial, punctuated with ghostly apparitions as if Christo had been driving through the village last night with a few spare sheets in the boot.

Our place is no exception. Each May, succulents and ferns are swaddled like newborns and not unwrapped until September. It used to be worse. Several years ago, our entire acre was shrouded at strategic points in an effort to get various species, like teenagers exposed to social media, past those vulnerable years.

We learned the hard way waging a war against this district of extremes was futile and watched on helplessly as the casualties mounted up.

Before our first winter here, we bought a flowering gum from a nurseryman down the coast who assured us it would thrive up above the escarpment. Within 12 hours, its textbook transplantation to a nice sunny spot in our yard turned from tentative success to catastrophic failure when an unseasonal frost came out of nowhere and reduced the stunning beauty to something you might find under the glove of an ill-prepared Westerner in the Himalayas.

We invested more effort in protecting its replacement when we became one of the 15 million households to plant one of those cleverly marketed Wollemi pines, only to become one of the 14.98 million households to watch our 'living dinosaur' go extinct before our eyes.

After a couple of more attempts at introducing something a little different to our property, we just gave up and, like everyone else, began overpopulating the place with photinia.

I tell myself it's really not such an ugly plant, yet know deep down surrendering to the species is the landscaping equivalent of kissing your sister.

I sometimes wonder whether our neck of the woods, considering the enormity of its frosts, shouldn't get more press as an internationally certified place of death. No matter how inured a reality show survivalist might be to the solitude and bone-clenching chill of an arctic November, I doubt they'd last a single night in our backyard by the time the Blues are getting around to their own winter ritual of losing Origin II.

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To be fair, though, the northern hemisphere is bonkers cold, literally breathtaking. I once spent several weeks in a town at the foot of the Rocky Mountains and have never experienced such a life-threatening freeze, realising how serious some winter ceremonies need to be.

When they get home from work, they plug in their cars, not to recharge batteries, but to keep engine blocks warm. Watching TV at night, temperature warnings flash over their screens, advising people to avoid leaving the house unprotected because they'll probably die on the way back from putting the bins out (which are emptied each morning by trained grizzlies).

Another ritual observed in the north, which is a little less confronting, yet no less odd than salting roads or mangling vowels, is 'wassail'.

Wassail can be both a noun and a verb. It's a spicy, cidery yuletide beverage, a type of song, an Anglo-Saxon way of giving thanks and, providing the conditions aren't too lethal, you can wassail your way from home to home under moonlight to be fed and inebriated at different cosy gatherings (sort of a progressive dinner but one where the majority of time is spent removing boots and coats then putting them back on again).

We did a little wassailing on Christmas Eve and discovered bloating yourself with mashed potatoes was another popular winter ritual.

Many years later, back Down Under, we brought the kids to a wassailing ceremony at a nearby orchard and watched as they were followed about by a good sport who was playing the role of the 'Green Man', an ancient pagan forest deity ... at least, we assumed he was a performer, otherwise it was just some guy who'd stumbled out of the bush with a clump of twigs stuck in his hair.

It's this time of year, I feel I share something with those prone to worshipping green men, or nymphs or sprites because, for me, the best winter tradition of all is communing with gentle, mysterious nature while armed with a chainsaw.

I love anything related to firewood. I love the cutting, the gathering, the burning; it's all immensely satisfying, if not increasingly frowned upon in this era of emissions chariness and the fact removing such a resource is an efficient way to make all those poor little sprites homeless.

Not that hunger for firewood seems to be diminishing. Covid lockdowns have only served to fuel demand for the primo fuel, while sellers around the country have been running out of supply and bumping up prices as a result. Even where we live, out in the bush, good-quality firewood is becoming more scarce and hyperlocal online forums have become platforms for trading the commodity with the same fervour of all those cryptocurrencies from a couple of months back before people woke up to themselves like a 17th Century Dutchman with a hangover and an armoire full of decomposing tulips.

Of course, come October, we'll all forget about firewood and start thinking about the ineluctable tradition of mowing the lawn, then, if we're unlucky, begin the ritual of preparing our homes for bushfire.

But that's the beauty (and the horror) of our boom-bust way of life and I don't think I could ever live happily without some sort of seasonal sway, some kind of bullying at the hands of the elements.

Maybe it's because I was born on the exact middle day of the year (and a big shout out to all my fellow existentially restive Cancerians) but taking time to consider the solstice seems to satisfy a certain yearning for cosmic symmetry.

It's cold comfort in uncertain times.