This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
It’s January 1, and the self-help corners of the internet tell me I’m supposed to wake up as a matcha-drinking, Pilates-doing goddess of discipline. Except I don’t like matcha, my gym leggings are in hibernation, and my discipline is nowhere to be found. Outside, winter has the nerve to continue.
“As you stride into the first week of the year full of good intentions, you may notice a sinking sensation: The vibes are just … off,” Isle McElroy wrote in 2024. And for many of us, they are—every year. In late November, winter can feel charming: Thanksgiving offers coziness and pie and the suggestion that cold weather is just a backdrop to togetherness. December doubles down—lights, parties, rituals designed to make the early sunsets feel intentional. Then comes New Year’s Eve, one last bit of glitter.
And then: January. A month so unadorned, it almost feels punitive. If December is champagne, January is the headache.
It’s tempting to surrender to the slump—to assume that the dullness is inevitable. But some writers throughout history have treated this month not as dead air but as an invitation: a moment when the world gets quiet enough that you can hear your own thoughts again. Henry David Thoreau’s New Year’s Day journal entries, published in The Atlantic in 1885, articulate how winter can sharpen a person’s senses. “The rude pioneer work of the world has been done by the most devoted worshipers of beauty,” he wrote. “In winter is their campaign … They are elastic under the heaviest burden, under the extremest physical suffering.” Even the landscape rewarded anyone who bothered to notice: Frozen branches became “fat, icy herbage”; weeds turned into “jewels.” “In this clear air and bright sunlight, the ice-covered trees have a new beauty,” he journaled in 1853.
Other writers in the archive seemed to recognize that same hidden momentum. In 1877, the poet Helen Hunt Jackson argued that winter is where fortitude gathers. “O Winter!,” she writes, “June could not hire / Her roses to forego the strength they learn / In sleeping on thy breast.” What looks like nothing happening is often everything happening, just beneath the surface.
Three years later, in her “New Year Song,” Celia Thaxter didn’t ask the month to transform her—she simply welcomed it.
Die and depart, Old Year, old sorrow!
Welcome, O morning air of health and strength!
O glad New Year, bring us new hope to-morrow,
With blossom, leaf, and fruitage bright at length.
Her January is a reminder that a new year can begin quietly and still begin well.
Recently, one writer observed that winter’s malaise can be a story we tell ourselves. Maggie Mertens noted in 2023 that although being sad in the wintertime is a “prevailing narrative” in American life, the data resist that frame: National depression rates across the year remain “flat as a pancake,” one researcher told her. Winter can be hard, but the belief that everyone is sadder during the season may simply be folklore passed off as fact. Taylor Kay Phillips argues that the secret to loving winter is to “first accept it, then enjoy it.” Beautiful things are possible “because of the freezing temperatures and the precipitation and the wind, not in spite of them,” she writes: “Snow days require snow. Cute gloves need cold hands.” Winter, she insists, is “its own rich, wonderful destination,” not an ordeal to endure en route to spring.
Which brings us back to our muted stretch of January. If you stop asking it to be December 2.0 and let it be what it is, the month stops feeling like the aftertaste of the holidays and starts to take on its own flavor. “When reality clashes with expectations, perhaps we should change our expectations,” McElroy wrote. Accept that old habits won’t melt away overnight, or by mid-January, or maybe even by March. Accept that the month will be cold and plainspoken.
January may still feel like a hangover. But a hangover isn’t just the end of the night. It’s the body recalibrating after excess. Let the month be quiet. Let it be simple. The doldrums may still knock—but if you meet the month on its own terms, they don’t have to linger.
