Walking before the storm is over, in the soft, subdued light.

December 24. 

December  24, 2016

More snow in the night and to-day, making nine or ten inches. 

P. M. — To Walden and Baker Farm with Ricketson, it still snowing a little. 

Turn off from railroad and went through Wheeler, or Owl, Wood. The snow is very light, so that sleighs cut through it, and there is but little sleighing. 

It is very handsome now on the trees by the main path in Wheeler Wood; also on the weeds and twigs that rise above the snow, resting on them just like down, light towers of down with the bare extremity of the twig peeping out  above. 

We push through the light dust, throwing it before our legs as a husbandman grain which he is sowing. It is only in still paths in the woods that it rests on the trees much. 

Am surprised to find Walden still open in the middle. When I push aside the snow with my feet, the ice appears quite black by contrast. 

There is considerable snow on the edge of the pine woods where I used to live. It rests on the successive tiers of boughs, perhaps weighing them down, so that the trees are opened into great flakes from top to bottom. 

The snow collects and is piled up in little columns like down about every twig and stem, and this is only seen in perfection, complete to the last flake, while it is snowing, as now. 

Return across the pond and go across to Baker Farm. 

Notice, at east end of westernmost Andromeda Pond, the slender spikes of lycopus with half a dozen distant little spherical dark-brown whorls of pungently fragrant or spicy seeds, somewhat nutmeg-like, or even like flagroot (?), when bruised. I am not sure that the seeds of any other mint are thus fragrant now. It scents your handkerchief or pocketbook finely when the crumbled whorls are sprinkled over them. 

It is very pleasant walking thus before the storm is over, in the soft, subdued light. We are also more domesticated in nature when our vision is confined to near and familiar objects. 

Do not see a track of any animal till returning near the Well Meadow Field, where many foxes (?), one of whom I have a glimpse of, had been coursing back and forth in the path and near it for three quarters of a mile. They had made quite a path. 

I do not take snuff. In my winter walks, I stoop and bruise between my thumb and finger the dry whorls of the lycopus, or water horehound, just rising above the snow, stripping them off, and smell that. That is as near as I come to the Spice Islands. That is my smelling-bottle, my ointment.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 24, 1856

The snow collects and is piled up in little columns like down about every twig and stem, and this is only seen in perfection, complete to the last flake, while it is snowing, as now. See December 26, 1853  ("It has fallen so gently that it forms an upright wall on the slenderest twig. And every twig thus laden is as still as the hillside itself. The sight . . . would tempt us to begin life again.”); January 14, 1853 ("White walls of snow rest on the boughs of trees, in height two or three times their thickness.”); February 21, 1854 ("You cannot walk too early in new-fallen snow to get the sense of purity, novelty, and unexploredness.") 

Foxes . . . one of whom I have a glimpse of . . . See February 10, 1856 ("I saw a fox on the railroad. . . He coursed, or glided, along easily, appearing not to lift his feet high, leaping over obstacles, with his tail extended straight behind. He leaped over the ridge of snow . . . between the tracks, very easily and gracefully.”)