December Prompts: How To Use Creative Prompts To Inspire December

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We have come all the way round.

Twelve months ago, in the first post in this series, we started in January with bare branches, frost, and the quiet of a world at rest. We have been through all of it since then. The pale green of April leaves. The dawn chorus in May. June’s longest evenings. The deep heat of July. August’s first whisper of change. The extraordinary colours of October. November’s quiet dark.

And now here we are in December. The last month. The closing chapter. The point where the year folds back into itself and begins again.

December is a month I find genuinely moving. Not just because of Christmas or the celebrations it contains, though those matter. But because of what is happening astronomically and ecologically underneath all of that. The light is returning. On the 21st or 22nd of December, the winter solstice marks the shortest day of the year. And then, the very next day, the light begins to come back. By just a few seconds at first. Then by a minute. Then more. The same slow, patient return we watched arriving back in January is beginning again.

The wheel turns. The year begins again. And if you have been paying attention all the way through, December feels like something genuinely profound.

This is the twelfth and final post in a year-long series about noticing the changing seasons through writing, photography, drawing, baking, and getting outside. Thank you for coming this far. Let’s end it well.

What’s Actually Happening Out There?

The winter solstice on the 21st or 22nd of December is the hinge point of the year. Everything has been moving towards this moment since the summer solstice in June. Every day since June has been fractionally shorter than the one before. On the solstice, that stops. The sun reaches its lowest point in the sky. Sunrise and sunset are as close together as they will ever be. And then the direction reverses.

In much of the UK, the solstice day has fewer than eight hours of daylight. For Scotland, it can be as few as 6.5 hours. In the northern US and Canada, daylight can be similarly short. In Scandinavia, the sun barely rises above the horizon at all. These are the conditions that gave rise to the great midwinter festivals across almost every culture in the northern hemisphere. Diwali, Hanukkah, Yule, Saturnalia, Christmas itself. All of them, in different ways, are responses to the darkness and celebrations of the returning light. The urge to create light and warmth in the darkest times is one of the most universal human impulses.

Ecologically

December is the year’s deepest rest. Most deciduous trees are fully bare now. The countryside is reduced to its essential lines and shapes. Many animals are in or approaching hibernation. The natural world is doing the minimum required to maintain itself until the light returns.

But not everything is quiet. Holly and ivy, both evergreen, are suddenly prominent now that the deciduous trees have lost their leaves. Robin song continues through winter, and on a quiet December morning, it is one of the most beautiful sounds of the year. Mistle thrushes sing from the tops of trees even in winter storms, which is why they are sometimes called stormcocks. Long-tailed tits move in small flocks through bare hedgerows, appearing suddenly and disappearing just as quickly. Deer are visible on open ground in a way they rarely are with more cover.

In the US, December brings the Christmas Bird Count, one of the oldest and largest citizen science projects in the world, run by the Audubon Society since 1900. Volunteers count every bird they can find on a single day within a designated circle, and the data are used to track long-term population trends. You can participate wherever you are in the Americas. Details at Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count page. The UK equivalent is the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch, which runs in late January but is worth knowing about as you head into the new year.

Nature Journalling: The Full Circle

December is the month to look back through whatever nature journaling you have done this year and reflect on what you have noticed. If you have kept any kind of seasonal record, even an occasional and irregular one, December is the time to read it back.

What you will probably find, if you have been doing this alongside these posts through the year, is that you now know your local patch of land or hedgerow or park more intimately than you did in January. You have watched it through its full annual cycle and know which tree turns first in autumn. You know where the snowdrops come up, what the dawn chorus sounds like at its peak in May and how different the same garden sounds in November.

This kind of accumulated, specific, local knowledge is genuinely valuable. It is the knowledge that people who live closely with the land have always had. We have largely lost it as a culture, and projects like this, paying this kind of attention, are one way to begin getting it back.

Prompt:

Write a December nature journal entry that covers the whole year. Not every detail. But the things that surprised you. The things you noticed for the first time. The single observation that has stayed with you most strongly. Write it as a letter to yourself in January of next year, telling yourself what to look out for. What do you wish you had known to pay attention to at the beginning?

For continuing your nature journaling practice into the new year, the Field Studies Council in the UK offers courses and resources for all levels. In the US, the John Muir Laws nature journalling community has a warm and active online presence with regular prompts and shared work.

Poetry: The Solstice and the Return

December has generated some of the greatest poetry in any tradition about darkness, light, and the turning of the year. It is a month where the cosmic and the domestic sit very close together. The candle lit against the dark. The fire built against the cold. The gathering of people around warmth. These are universal human acts that have been described and celebrated in poetry across thousands of years.

The Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, one of the oldest poems in the English language, moves through winter darkness and exile towards a hard-won sense of consolation and meaning. It was written more than a thousand years ago and feels completely alive in December.

TS Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi is set in midwinter and uses the cold and the dark as the texture of a spiritual transformation. His Four Quartets, particularly East Coker and Little Gidding, return again and again to the idea of endings and beginnings, of the dark necessary to the light, of what it means to complete a journey and begin it again. Little Gidding ends with one of the most consoling sentences in English poetry, about arriving where we started and knowing the place for the first time. December seems to me exactly the right time to read it. The full text is available at the Poetry Foundation.

In the Norse tradition, the concept of Yggdrasil, the world tree that connects all realms and persists through winter, is a powerful image for December. The tree that stands bare but alive through the darkest time, carrying within it the potential for the whole year to come.

Prompt:

Write a poem for the solstice. It could be a poem of gratitude for the year that is ending. Or a poem of welcome for the light that is returning. It could be something more personal, about what this particular year has meant, what you have noticed, what has changed in you. Try to use the specific images of December where you are. The bare trees. The early dark. The particular quality of winter light on a clear, cold day. End with something true about beginnings.

Photography: Winter Light and the Solstice

December light is extraordinary when it appears. The sun is at its lowest angle all year, which means that even at midday, the light comes in at a very low angle, creating long shadows and illuminating textures in a way no other month can match. On a clear December day, the quality of the light in the middle of the afternoon has a warmth and a drama that is genuinely spectacular.

The challenge is that December days are short, and clear days are not guaranteed. You have to be ready to go out quickly when the conditions are right. A clear, cold December afternoon with low sun and frost is one of the best photography conditions of the year. Everything sparkles. Shadows are enormous. The light is gold and horizontal, making the most ordinary things look significant.

The solstice itself is worth photographing as an event. Note where the sun rises and sets on the 21st of December. If you can photograph it from the same location where you photographed the summer solstice sunrise or sunset in June, the difference in the sun’s arc will be dramatic and visually striking. The sun will rise and set much farther south in December than in June.

Holly berries and ivy against bare branches, frost on fallen leaves and seed heads, the blue dusk of a short December afternoon, a window lit from inside against the dark. These are December’s distinctive photographic subjects, and they are worth seeking out specifically.

Prompt:

Photograph the winter solstice. Go out at the exact moment of sunrise or sunset on the 21st or 22nd of December and photograph it from a fixed point. Then find a photograph you took at sunrise or sunset around the summer solstice in June, or take a fresh one at any point in December, and compare the two. The difference in where the sun sits in the sky, how high it climbs, and where it rises and sets on the horizon, tells the story of the whole year in two images.

For solstice photography inspiration, English Heritage livestreams the solstice sunrise at Stonehenge every year, which is both beautiful and interesting to watch as context for your own local solstice photography.

Short Story: The Return

We have reached the end of the year, and it is time to write about endings and beginnings. The two, in December, are almost the same thing. The year ends and the year begins. The darkness reaches its limit, and the light starts back. The same moment that closes one cycle opens the next.

The return is one of the oldest and most powerful story structures in all of literature. Odysseus returns to Ithaca. The prodigal son returning home. Frodo returns to the Shire after everything has changed. What makes the return story powerful is not just the arrival but the question of what has changed, in the character, in the place, in the relationship between the two.

December is also a month when people return in person. To family homes, to places of origin, to people they haven’t seen in months. These returns carry all the complexity that the story has always found in them. The place that is both the same and completely different. The person who has changed and the person who hasn’t. The warmth and the difficulty of being back somewhere that holds everything you came from.

Prompt:

Write a story of no more than 1000 words about a return in December. A character returns to a place or person after a significant absence. It might be a return to a family home for Christmas. It might be a return to a place in the natural world that they haven’t visited since summer. Let the December landscape be present, the cold, the bare trees, the early dark, the lights in windows. Let the return reveal something that the character couldn’t have seen before they left.

Drawing: The Evergreens and the Decorated World

December is when the evergreens come into their own. Holly, ivy, yew, box, pine, fir. All the plants that kept their green through the year and were largely unnoticed against the summer abundance are suddenly prominent and significant.

Holly, in particular, is one of the most satisfying plants to draw. The leaves are complex and variable. Each one is different from the others in the precise arrangement of its spines and lobes. The berries are a deep, glossy red, almost perfectly spherical, and they cluster in groups against the dark green of the leaves, a pattern that is both decorative and structurally interesting.

Pine and fir branches with their needles and, if you can find them, their cones are also rich drawing subjects. Pine cones have a beautiful mathematical structure: their scales are arranged in a Fibonacci spiral, the same pattern you find in sunflower heads and nautilus shells. Drawing a pine cone carefully and slowly is a satisfying December exercise that teaches you something about the underlying order in natural forms.

The decorated world of December is also worth drawing. A candle in a window. A wreath on a door. A bowl of clementines and nuts on a table. A Christmas tree with its lights and ornaments. These are not traditionally considered serious subjects for botanical or nature illustration, but they are part of what December looks like, and they connect the domestic warmth of the season to the natural world that much of the decoration draws on.

Prompt:

Draw a sprig of holly with berries, taking as much time as you need to get the glossiness of the berries and the complexity of the leaf spines right. Then, alongside it, draw something from your domestic December, a candle, a clementine, a Christmas decoration, anything that represents your personal version of December warmth. Put the natural and the domestic together on the same page. That combination, the wild and the made, the cold outside and the warm inside, is December.

For botanical illustration of winter plants specifically, the work of Rory McEwen, though he worked primarily with tropical flowers, has an approach to depicting the specific, individual quality of each plant that is inspiring and applicable to whatever you are drawing. His work is held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and some of it is viewable online.

Baking and Seasonal Eating: The Full Ceremony of December

December is the great ceremonial month for food. More than at any other time of year, December eating is connected to ritual, tradition, memory, and the specific pleasure of things that happen only once a year.

I’m not going to give you a recipe for Christmas dinner. You have your own traditions, and they are probably exactly right for you. What I want to do instead is notice the seasonal ingredients that belong specifically to December and encourage you to use them with attention.

Clementines and satsumas are at their peak. The smell of a clementine being peeled is one of those intensely seasonal smells that immediately evokes December for almost everyone. Pomegranates are excellent. Dates are arriving for the season. Chestnuts are still here for a few more weeks.

Forced chicory, also called chicons, is now in bloom and is one of December’s secret pleasures. Pale yellow and slightly bitter, it is wonderful braised in butter with a little orange juice, or used raw in a salad with walnuts, blue cheese, and a mustardy dressing. It’s available through winter but peaks in December and January.

Spices are December’s flavour language. Cinnamon, cloves, star anise, cardamom, nutmeg. The warming spices that appear in mulled wine, Christmas cakes, mince pies, and gingerbread have been associated with winter celebrations for centuries. Many of them were historically very expensive luxury goods that appeared only at the year’s most important celebrations, which is partly why they still feel festive.

Recipe prompt:

Make something spiced that you make only in December. Mulled wine or mulled cider. A batch of mince pies, if that is part of your tradition. Gingerbread, which is one of the oldest recipes in European baking, appears in some form across almost every culture from Scandinavia to the Middle East. Or, if you want something simpler, make a spiced hot chocolate with whole milk, good dark chocolate, a cinnamon stick, a couple of cardamom pods, and a grating of nutmeg. Drink it outside if the weather allows, on the longest night, in the cold, looking at the sky.

For December baking, Nigella Lawson’s Christmas writing has warmth and ceremony in equal measure. For US readers, King Arthur Baking’s holiday recipes are thorough and reliable.

One Last Thing

A year ago, or at the beginning of this series, I said that January gets unfairly dismissed. I said that paying close attention might change how the month feels. I believe that is true of every month since then.

Here is what I have found, doing this research and writing all year. The seasons are not decoration. They are not a backdrop. They are the actual structure of the world we live in, the same structure that every human being who has ever lived on this part of the planet has lived inside. The snowdrop in February, the dawn chorus in May, and the turning beech leaves in October have been happening every year for longer than we can imagine. People have been noticing them, feeling moved by them, and writing about them for as long as there has been writing.

Paying attention to the seasons is a way of connecting to all of that. To the enormous, patient continuity of the natural world. To the specific, irreplaceable particularity of this year, this October, this frost, this robin singing in this garden on this December morning.

The year ends. The wheel turns. The light begins its slow return.

Go outside on the solstice. Note where the sun sets. Note the time. Write it down somewhere. Come back in June and see how far it has travelled.

Then start again.

The end of the year. The beginning of the next. Thank you for noticing.