When Winter Comes South

Winter doesn’t so much arrive in Florida as it drifts in like a rumor—soft, uncertain, apologetic about the inconvenience. The palm fronds never quite lose their green; the sky doesn’t bruise itself into snow clouds; the cold only lingers long enough to make you question whether you imagined it. But every year, sometime after Thanksgiving, the air shifts. It smells different—cleaner, sharper, like citrus peeled open too fast. And that’s when the ritual begins.

It starts with a fire by the barn.

The barn leans just enough to make you wonder what keeps it standing—loyalty or stubbornness—but the fire pit in front of it is the true heart of winter. My G-Pa always starts it. He wears his overalls and Velcro shoes like a uniform, always sporting a fresh scratch or bruise despite the doctor’s latest lecture and my grandmother’s sighs. He smells faintly of diesel, pine, and the metallic tang of tools, even on days he doesn’t lift a finger. He crouches low—old knees cracking like thin ice—and arranges palmetto logs and oak pieces with a reverence he wouldn’t admit to.

My father stands beside him, hands in pockets, breath visible in the rare Florida chill. They don’t talk at first. At least, in any verbal sense. Their language is silence, followed by recent happenings of work in the yard, or updates from run-ins with ol’ so-and-so from back when. G-Pa lights a match, muttering something like, “Watch this damn thing not light,” daring the fire to prove him wrong. The flame catches anyway, because somehow it always does. When the first glow rises, he grins like a boy who just got away with something, and usually mutters something like, “Well son of a bitch—I’ll be.”

My father chuckles—differently than when he laughs. His laughter is loud, guttural, and echoes with honest amusement you can’t fake. But with the fire, the swearing, and the chuckle, winter truly begins.

We don’t wear heavy coats; Florida doesn’t believe in them. Light jackets, hoodies, sometimes unzipped out of habit. As a kid, someone would always bring Old Milwaukee for the red beer cooler. Eventually, it became N.A. beer, and after the heart ablations, Grandmother’s sweet tea or G-pa’s instant coffee was as strong as it got—except for Dad’s 64oz cup of Pepsi from Circle K. A radio perched on a tractor tire plays Hank Jr., Marty Robbins, Merle Haggard, George Jones—the sacred liturgy of country Christmas. Those voices feel older than the barn, older than the fire, older than the Scotch-Irish blood in the blue eyes of the men around me.

G-Pa’s eyes are the bluest you’ll ever see—sharp enough to call forth the truth in you, soft enough to hold a tenderness he rarely speaks aloud. He prefers stories about my dad and uncle doing “crazy shit,” usually involving fire, speed, or ill-advised ingenuity, punctuated by my father revealing some detail my grandparents “never needed to know until now.”

My father has those same eyes. That same stubborn kindness. That same laugh that forces the whole night into honesty.

Inside, my grandmother keeps the sanctuary lit.

Elvis Presley’s Christmas album plays from somewhere in the background. Just follow her rules: 1) Don’t change it. 2) Don’t try to imitate the King. She bakes peanut butter cookies—the kind with fork marks pressed into the tops—moving through the kitchen like warmth itself. She’s a saint in every quiet way that matters. She does everything for everyone, never speaks ill of a soul, and somehow knows the exact sentence you need before you admit you’re hurting. Her advice comes soft and steady, never cliché, never judgmental—just truth wrapped in gentleness. I imagine her to be the closest example of Jesus I’ve seen.

I drift between the barn and the kitchen, between smoke and cinnamon, Hank Jr. and Elvis, between the wilder warmth of the men and the steady warmth of my grandmother’s love. It is the closest thing to ritual my childhood ever knew.

Because the other side of my Christmas—the one with my mother—was unpredictable.

Some years we had a tree. Some years we didn’t. Some mornings gifts were opened before sunrise; other years, the holiday barely landed at all. Sometimes she was joyful; sometimes she disappeared into her room; sometimes the day spun sideways before we even held a moment still. Her unpredictability wasn’t cruelty—it was weather. Storms that came out of nowhere, skies that cleared too fast, emotional patterns that only made sense from very far away. But as a kid, you don’t have the altitude to understand a hurricane from above. You only know when lightning feels too close.

So the barn-fire Christmas—its steadiness, its ritual, its predictable glow—became my anchor. Something I could trust. Something I could carry.

Out by the barn, the stories flowed as easily as the beer. G-Pa telling fishing tales where the fish practically staged an uprising. My dad interrupting them with confessions. My grandmother stepping outside with a fresh tray of cookies, shaking her head at their antics but smiling because she loves them more than they deserve.

Somewhere in that interplay of flame and laughter and crosshatched cookies, winter became a place rather than a season. A geography of people rather than a shift in air.

For most of my life, that was the only winter I knew. I grew up in Florida, went to college in Florida, stayed in Florida for over three decades. Seasons came and went like rumors; winter was something you conjured, not something you experienced.

And then I turned 33, packed up my life, and moved with my family to North Carolina.

That December, standing on the edge of a forest behind our new home, it snowed. Not flurries pretending to be snow. Real snow. Falling soft and quiet, blanketing the ground in a hush so complete it felt like the entire world was holding its breath.

I watched it come down—thick, soft, indifferent to my awe—and felt something in me loosen. Something I didn’t know had been clenched my whole life. For the first time, I understood why people used words like “enchanted” or “holy” or “hushed” about winter. The air tasted clean. The trees stood like parishioners in a white-robed choir. The ground softened into forgiveness.

But even as it snowed—beautiful, silent, ancient—I realized all I could think about was the barn fire back home.

The longnecks sweating in the cold. The tractor-tire radio. The sound of Hank Jr. drifting through the dark. The blue eyes of my father and G-Pa reflecting flame. My grandmother pressing a warm cookie into my hand without a word.

Snow was beautiful. But fire was home.

So I built my own ritual in this new place. A fire pit in the backyard, stacked carefully, lit slowly. Sometimes I turn on those old country Christmas songs, letting Merle and George drift across a North Carolina field the way they once drifted across a Florida barnyard. Sometimes I make my grandmother’s cookies, pressing the fork into the dough as if the crosshatch is a compass pointing me southward. Sometimes I stand outside in the cold—real cold now—and breathe out into the air, remembering the rare nights in Florida when my breath did the same.

My kids gather around the fire the way I once did—curious, restless, poking sticks into the embers, arguing about whose marshmallow is better. They ask about the music, why the voices sound “grainy,” why I smile when certain songs come on.

I tell them about G-Pa.

About the barn.

About the winter that never quite formed but somehow shaped me anyway.

About the unpredictability I grew up with, and the ritual that saved me.

About the way fire can be a kind of inheritance.

They don’t understand it yet. But I can feel something settling inside them. A warmth. A memory in the making. A rhythm older than they are.

And when the night is winding down—when the kids are inside, and the last log has cracked open into a slow amber glow—I stay a moment longer.

The world grows quiet in a way that feels familiar and new at the same time. The air settles. The embers pulse softly. I watch the rise and fall of heat, the tiny bursts of splintered wood, the subtle sway of flame leaning one way, then the other.

The fire constricts and expands like lungs. It coughs. It sighs. It chuckles.

A rhythm I recognize.

A rhythm that holds all the winters I’ve known—Florida nights by the barn, the gentle snow in a North Carolina forest, the stories told, the ones avoided, the ones inherited.

A rhythm older than the barn, older than the men who built it, older than the land itself.

And in that slow inhale and exhale of fire, I see it—the lineage, the memory, the warmth we keep choosing. A heartbeat made of flame. A season held in the space between the glow, and the night.

A reminder that even in a place without snow or frost, winter still knows how to breathe.