When I was a child, February was a cheery month, one filled with holidays and reprieve from school routine. Celebration of George Washington’s February 22nd birthday included cherry cakes and trips to The Miller House where he stayed while planning the 1776 Battle of White Plains. On display in the stone house: Revolutionary War era-looking boots, a uniform that looked like a general’s, the table where he ate, and the bed where he slept (I fell for it hook, line and sinker). Cherry cake symbolized the teaching moment of his confessing to chopping down his father’s cherry tree with a hatchet: “For I cannot tell a lie, Father,”—all was forgiven for telling the truth (not in my house it wouldn’t have been).

We celebrated Lincoln’s birthday on February 12th with tales of his hardscrabble childhood, splitting wood with an axe, the Civil War, Mary Todd, the poor son Willie dead at 11, and his assassination. We did not enjoy cakes or field trips for Lincoln, alas, but it provided a break from memorizing:

Thirty days hath September, 
April, June, and November, 
February has twenty-eight alone, 
All the rest have thirty-one; 
Excepting leap year, that's the time 
When February's days are twenty-nine.

Washington and Lincoln had axe-wielding childhoods far from my experience and nevertheless, or consequentially, fascinating. Washington’s birthday is a Federal holiday, celebrated in the 21st c. on the third Monday of the month (his actual birthday was February 11, 1731, but with the British 1752 switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, it was recalculated to February 22, 1732) and is referred to as Presidents’ Day. Very few states celebrate Lincoln’s February 12th birthday now, including my home states of New York and Massachusetts, and it is marked only by inclusion in Presidents’ Day.

In between the two birthdays, elementary schools celebrated Valentine’s Day with little cards distributed in class by secret admirers. The card distribution allowed some level of running around the little wooden desks from the ink well era, a rare event. The teachers made sure everyone received some admiration—I hope—along with the sweets they provided (or it may have been that the mothers—assumed to have been at home in their aprons—were pressed into baking for the occasion).

With adolescence and early adulthood, February fell down a peg or two in cheer, plummeting to what it is: the absolute dead of winter. Presidents’ Day sometimes was a day off from work, a weekend to make the rounds of car dealers for many. The 12th was noted only in passing, with little reverence paid to the great man. Valentine’s Day was fraught or not, depending upon one’s love life—secret admirers were low on the ground but once revealed, often a disappointment.

According to the poetry of my childhood, February brings blooming daffodils, newborn lambs, and a heavy hint of spring in the air (Anne Brontë wrote that her “…bosom glowed…” in February!). These poems were written with temperate British Isles or the Mediterranean as a backdrop. In New York and certainly in New England, the month seems more Shakespearean; from Much Ado About Nothing:

Why, what's the
matter,
That you have such
a February face,
So full of frost, of
storm and
cloudiness?

Certainly in New England, as Joseph Wood Krutch observed, “The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.”

Fast forward to, ahem, well past middle age, and my reactions to February have changed again: I now treasure it as a time of privacy, comparative inaction, and a chance to experience delayed gratification in the modern world. To quote William Blake, “In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.” From a gardener’s perspective, the benefit of winter in general, and arguably February in particular, is captured eloquently by gardener/writer Ruth Stout in How to Have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back: “There is a privacy about winter which no other season gives you…Only in winter…can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.”

From a writer’s perspective, February is a wonderful time to hunker and write—nothing’s calling you outside for very long, nobody’s demanding much of you, as long as the heat is on, the wood stacked next to the woodstove, the larder stocked, and you add to the feeling of general coziness in your household—what the Danes and Norwegians call hygge.

In her poem, “February,” Margaret Atwood describes her -30 F degree, wind-blasted Canadian version of surviving February, which as it does in my milder winter life, includes eating accordingly:

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It's his
way of telling whether or not I'm dead. 
[...]
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
[...]

“In the pewter mornings…” How perfect is that? The entire version (not copied here) of this wonderful poem is posted on www.poetryfoundation.org and is published in Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House (1995, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

For the delayed gratification that may be found in February, turn to William Cullen Bryant, renowned and influential (before there were influencers) 19th c. poet, journalist, liberal, editor, and late of the parish next door in Western Massachusetts: “The February sunshine steeps your boughs and tints the buds and swells the leaves within.”

The orbit/tilt is shifting toward spring in February, noticeable only by the slow crawl of the earlier sunrise this month. The tinted buds and swelling leaves are hidden. Unlike March, the shift this month is so subtle that even the avid looker, the trained seer, must trust that the plants and animals are changing, shifting toward spring. In my youth I willed February, the shortest month, to end, but now I dread its ending. I dread losing the promise held by the dead of winter and the loss of breathtaking moments like this, so beautifully described by Sara Teasdale in her poem, “February Twilight”:

I stood beside a hill
Smooth with new-laid snow,
A single star looked out
From the cold evening glow.
There was not other creature
That saw what I could see,
I stood and watched the evening star
As long as it watched me.