When December Takes So Much, and January Asks for More

December’s external expectation feels the same: keep going, keep smiling, keep creating something special.

December is a month where we are often expected to be so much. To make magic. To organise, plan, remember, anticipate, and soothe. It’s a busy, intense time in the middle of winter, a season when the rest of the natural world sits still. Animals retreat. Plants rest. Yet here we are, doing more. A huge surge of energy, even while the land is dormant.

In older understandings of time, midwinter was for stillness. For survival. For conserving energy and not asking more than the body could give. And yet we are told this is the moment to perform, and then to transform. The solstice, the 21st, was a time to celebrate the return of the light. The longest night was over, and the sun began its gentle return. But I can’t say I find much gentleness in December.

As soon as Christmas ends, the messaging shifts toward improvement. New routines. New bodies. New goals. New discipline. A demand to reset and reinvent ourselves as if December never happened. As if we haven’t just carried weeks of emotional and logistical labour.

Toxic wellness culture tells us that worth is tied to productivity. That rest must be earned. That slowing down is the same as falling behind. These messages land especially heavily on women, particularly within cis-hetero dynamics, where women often absorb Christmas like a full-time job, and are then asked, often without rest or recognition, to improve themselves.

But rest is not a failure of discipline. Exhaustion is not a personal flaw. And stillness is not stagnation.

A gentler truth exists alongside all of this: you are not behind. You have already done enormous, unseen work. January does not get to invalidate December.

Maybe you don’t need to become someone new. Maybe rest is the work. Maybe this season isn’t asking for growth at all, but for softness and care.

We are not late.

We are simply still in winter. A time to rest and recover. Spring will bring more light and energy in its own time, if we allow ourselves to be still.

Josie