There is great irony in the fact that we tend to associate the winter holiday season with busyness, stress, and overwhelm. While we are rushing and doing, the natural world around us is in a completely oppositional state—resting, slowing down, cooling, hibernating, restoring itself. As the days grow shorter and darkness falls earlier, we long for more hours in the day, more daylight, more time to attend to the multitude of seasonal tasks and obligations. This startling juxtaposition between the natural world and the human world carries an important lesson about self-care, burnout, and rest.

The problem is that we rarely pay attention to the great teacher, nature. The statistics from the human world are stark: The risk of having a heart attack or stroke rises during the holiday season (Aubrey, 2025), nearly 9 in 10 U.S. adults report that something causes them stress during the holiday season (American Psychological Association, 2023), and three in five Americans feel their mental health is negatively impacted by the holidays (Gillison,........

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