There aren’t a whole lot of positive things to be said for February except that we’ve gotten past the darkest days and are on our way to spring. For such a short month, we seem to have a plethora of special days, most of which could be celebrated at any other time of year if history hadn’t plopped them right in the dreariest season of the calendar. The only holiday of the month that seems to be appropriate to the season is Groundhog Day. Early February is exactly the proper time to celebrate such a hopeful, optimistic event as the lengthening of days and the warming of climate.
St. Valentine’s Day is a hodge-podge of religious observations and pagan rituals that have morphed into a tradition that resembles neither of its origins and would benefit from being observed in June when romance and weddings run rampant.
The birthdays of two presidents were dictated by events that had little to do with the time of year and fiddled with until the dates we are supposed to celebrate those events have been shifted around. When I was in elementary school, we celebrated Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays separately. We reviewed the well-worn myth of Lincoln doing his arithmetic problems with charred wood from the fireplace and walking a great distance to return a borrowed book. We then cut a silhouette of his head from black construction paper, mounted in on a sheet of white paper and posted it on the bulletin board in our classroom. Later in that same month, we rehashed to tale of George Washington and the cherry tree, followed by another construction paper silhouette for the bulletin board. Both those special birthdays were later absorbed by a President’s Day honoring all our presidents and the days became watered-down and blurred. Groundhog Day, on the other hand, has not been declared a national holiday so it’s not likely that Congress will mess around with it in order to give themselves another long weekend off from work. Fortunately, many of those special days are not official holidays, but merely special observances, many initiated by commercial interests.
With days lengthening, I once again believe that I’ll survive another long trip around the sun, a likelihood that dims during the dark days of January. I experience a mild depression during those dark winter days and find that turning on lights to dispel the gloom elevates my mood. This has something to do with the effects of sunlight on the pituitary gland, and I’m reminded that chickens lay more eggs when the daylight is supplemented by artificial lighting, and houseplants grow faster when placed under bright lamps. This later phenomenon is dramatically illustrated by the blooms produced by the cactus plants that spend the winter in my sunroom. Once the days begin to lengthen, they stir from their winter rest and, with just a little encouragement from water and fertilizer, send out new growth and impressive numbers of buds that rapidly turn into gorgeous but regrettably short-lived blossoms.
Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health refer to that sense of gloom as Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD. For some people, this “disorder” can be truly debilitating. For most of us, it is just the “winter blahs.” A simple matter of spending thirty minutes a day gazing at a specially designed light seems to improve the disorder for most people and validates my habit of sleeping with a low-watt lamp turned on in the room. But I’m beginning to wonder about the wisdom of it all. I think that “cure” is wonderful for those people who are so severely affected that it makes it impossible for them to function, but it might eventually be harmful to tamper with that winter tendency to slow down.
If we felt as energetic and cheerful in February as we do in June—would we still appreciate summer? Should we dare to program ourselves to a consistent mental outlook? Would this lead to a sameness so boring that we would need more and more stimulation in order to feel good? The whole thing could get out of hand and become dangerous. As they say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And don’t expect me to be out of bed before the sun comes up.