Tales.

American Spectator on tales best for winter, ones of sprites and goblins ...

It is easy to forget, in an era of central heating, triple-pane windows, and loose-fill fiberglass insulation, just how brutal winters were for our ancestors. Peter Hitchens, in his 1999 jeremiad The Abolition of Britain, blamed the advent of central heating and double-glazing for the fragmentation of society, insofar as these technological developments have “allowed even close-knit families to avoid each other’s company in well-warmed houses, rather than huddling round a single hearth forced into unwanted companionship, and so compelled to adapt to each other’s foibles and become more social, less selfish beings.” Modern social disengagement has many root causes aside from forced air heating, but the decline of the hearth as the focal point of domestic life cannot be denied.

The hearth-fire was once sacred, held in the highest reverence. There was “clearly an ancient relation,” wrote the wonderfully-named French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, “between the worship of the dead and the hearth-fire. We may suppose, therefore, that the domestic fire was in the beginning only the symbol of the worship of the dead; that under the stone of the hearth an ancestor reposed; that the fire was lighted there to honor him, and that this fire seemed to preserve life in him, or represented his soul as always vigilant.” In the ancient world, “hearth-fire demons, heroes, Lares, all were confounded,” and there “remained in the hearth-fire whatever of divine was most accessible to man.” These days, a domestic fireplace is usually surmounted by a flat-panel television, a device that once forced families into a sort of passive companionship, at least until the appearance of laptops, smartphones, and tablets further fragmented our social relations. The decline of the hearth is the decline of song, of memory, of culture, of the gentle art of belonging.

The origins of storytelling around the fire are prehistoric in nature, and it has even been hypothesized that the extended hours of firelight, and the complex social interactions made possible by these evening gatherings, fostered cognitive development in our species. In midwinter, when the day submits so readily to night’s cold embrace, the need for hearthside tales was all the greater, but what sorts of stories should they be?