STORY BY ANTHONY CARRUBBA

During the slow trudge of midwinter, everything seems to drag on endlessly. Even getting out of bed in the morning feels like an impossible task, with the cold biting your skin. Far easier to stay under the covers. Exercise routines lay abandoned amidst icy weather, social outings dwindle during the dark and chilly evenings. Leaving for work in the morning becomes a protracted process, needing to allow time to clear stubborn sheets of ice from the windshield and warm up the car. In some parts of regional Victoria, even snow falls, layering the Australian countryside underneath an atypical white blanket. 

Despite having passed the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, it remains hard to imagine that spring really is on the way. With warm weather such a distant prospect, sunny days spent picnicking or warm evenings out with friends are the stuff of daydreams. The prospect of the long stretch of the winter months is enough to make you want to hibernate, which is exactly what some human populations in the past decided to do. Sort of.

In the historical past, in the thick of the deadly Russian winter, some peasants were believed to have spent no less than 6 icy months in a state of near hibernation. With the cold weather making agricultural cultivation mostly impossible, families would spend most of the winter gathered around the hearth or wood stove in their cramped homes. They would sleep and attempt to ward off the cold with a mixture of fire, body heat and protective clothing, rising only to take a meagre amount of food and water. Lowered energy expenditure meant that they could subsist on a low-calorie diet until spring. This period of winter repose was known as ‘lotska’, and is believed to have been especially common during the Little Ice Age of the 16th – 19th Centuries.

Even peasants in the comparatively warmer climates of France were thought to have spent more time indoors practicing this form of pseudo-hibernation while the harsh conditions outside made most forms of work near-impossible.

However, some experts have cast doubt on the idea of human hibernation as a historical practice, largely citing a variety of productive jobs that could have been practiced aside from agriculture during the winters of the Little Ice Age; weaving, tool-mending, and caring for animals are a few examples.

Whatever the truth may be, it is undeniable some winter days are best spent cosied up at home, warm and with a hearty meal to enjoy.