How to Deal With the Winter Blues (other dark colours are available)

By: Blonde Two

It has been cold this week, down here in Devon. Maybe not as cold as in Up Country but we have been feeling the chill, mostly because we are more used, round these parts, to a kind of mucky dampness.

The tricky thing with mucky dampness is that it brings with it such light-sucking colours as grim grey, murky blue and dirty black. Add this to the lack of light we all experience over the shorter days of mid-winter (no frosty wind here but it is bleak and moaning) and it is small wonder that some of us start to feel the downward sucking of the winter blues (personally I think winter greys are more apt).

There are ways, of course, of dealing with the winter blues. Our pagan foremothers knew the importance of additional lights when it came to cheering up and we do our best to do the same via candles, strings of oddly-shaped lights and blow-up illuminated snowwomen. The good news is that is only 7 days now until the winter solstice when we can all celebrate the fact that, no matter how grumpy we get over Christmas, the nights are going to be shorter and the days perhaps a little less grey. Until spring chirps her way into our lives again we will have to make the best of the murky greyness. Here are 5 ways that the outdoors women (or man) can beat the winter blues:

Make a flask of hot chocolate, #GetOutside with it into your nearest woods, sit underneath a tree and listen to the birdsong.
Choose the coldest night possible, wrap up really warm, #GetOutside, lie back on a tarpaulin and watch the moon .
Bring a bit of #GetOutside into your home. Maybe some berries or a wreath made of willow but definitely not a dead badger.
#GetOutside at dawn for 5 days in a row and take a picture of the same natural scene, at the same time on different days.
#GetOutside in the dark. Beat the early onset of darkness by venturing into it, darkness adventures make great stories!