Instead of marking the first dire embrace of winter, solstice really is when things begin their first baby steps toward waking up. If the year were a day, it isn’t midnight but the start of dawn. The sun’’s first magical soul-warming sliver is now peeking over the black horizon. Sleepily but steadily, we are sauntering back toward summer.

This is especially true in northern Pacific coastal latitudes like ours where the swirling ocean maelstrom spawns monstrous storms on a timetable that doesn’t heed the modern calendar. If you’ve just moved here, don’t despair — we’re actually toward the end of the worst, not at the beginning. Our howling winter runs about Halloween to Valentine’s Day.

It is, of course, spitting in fate’s face to write this. The North Pacific is brazenly capable of erupting into perfect awfulness at any point between now and at least April. But usually by around Christmas, odds steadily dwindle for the sort of demonic events that suck all the air out of your lungs and try to punch you over a cliff edge.

If you don’t believe me, leading University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass wrote: Real Northwest winter starts roughly the first week of November and roughly ends the last week of February, so we are now in the vicinity of midway. Congratulations! By real winter, I mean the period we typically get serious weather — the big windstorms, rainstorms, flooding, snow events, etc. Yes, I know — it can be cloudy and grungy into June, but if you look at any of the statistics, we rarely get the big stuff after March 1.

To be more precise, Mass places the start of Northwest spring on Feb. 23. By then, on the state’s south coast we’ll already have happy daffodils in bloom. Spunky skunk cabbage — possessing a sort of chemical furnace to sensibly create their own internal warmth — will be greening local wetlands and creek bottoms.

So rejoice — this is not only Christmastime, but the turn of the seasonal tide.

Intimate delights

In “The Winter Evening” (1785), William Cowper captured the right spirit in which to traverse the brief but occasionally bleak weeks immediately ahead.

I crown thee King of intimate delights,

Fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness,

And all the comforts of the lowly roof

Of undisturb’d retirement, and the hours

Of long uninterrupted evening, know.

If something about the cadence or feeling of this poem fragment seems familiar, maybe it’s because it literally comes from the same neighborhood as “Amazing Grace.” One of those hymns that transcend organized religion, “Amazing Grace” is attributed to Cowper’s’ collaborator, pastor and friend John Newton.

‘Amazing Grace’

Written to accompany a sermon on New Year’s Day 1773, it was always meant to comfort and inspire plain people. More than 250 years later, “Amazing Grace” is still powerful. I won’t quote it all here, but its last stanza fits well with my wintry theme:

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,

The sun forbear to shine;

But God, who call’d me here below,

Will be forever mine.

No matter the season — shadowed or sun-drenched — we need to brace our families up. We all need grace to lead us home.