A Note from the Artistic Director

Once Upon a Winter: Tales of Wonder Through a Child’s Eyes

December 5, 12 & 13, 2026  | Print

Tales of Wonder Through a Child’s Eyes…

Every fairy tale begins with a blank page.

Every winter begins with a blank landscape.

Overnight, the familiar world is covered in snow, and suddenly everything seems possible. Children are often the first to understand this. They step outside and begin to write their stories across the white landscape—with footprints, snow angels, sled tracks, and laughter.

Winter has always invited us to do the same.

Across cultures and across centuries, the longest nights of the year have drawn people together to light candles, gather around tables, tell stories, and sing. Though the customs differ from place to place, they often spring from the same deeply human desires: for warmth, for home, for hope, and for one another.

Once Upon a Winter traces this shared story through the eyes of a child. We begin in wonder, where winter is first encountered as sound, snow, moonlight, and quiet beauty (Snowforms, Winter Wonders). From there, the blank landscape begins to fill.

In Iran, Yalda Night celebrates the longest night of the year with poetry, storytelling, candlelight, and the gathering of family and friends. One of China’s most beloved folk songs, Kang Ding Qing Ge (“Kang Ding Love Song”), has become closely associated with Dongzhi (冬至), the Winter Solstice Festival celebrated throughout East Asia. Marking the year’s shortest day and the gradual return of longer daylight, Dongzhi is a time for family reunions, shared meals, and gratitude. Together with the Hanukkah songs that conclude this chapter (Mi Y’maleil / S’vivon), these traditions remind us that people have long answered winter’s darkness by gathering together in hope.

The journey then turns inward. In Lament for Pasiphaë and How Like a Winter Hath My Absence Been, Robert Graves and William Shakespeare use winter not simply as a season, but as a metaphor for longing, absence, and the quiet endurance required when life itself seems to grow cold.

Light gradually returns, not only in candles and stars, but in the hope they represent (Light: A Song for Chanukah, Night of Silence). It Feels New reminds us that after the longest nights, the world itself can appear transformed. The familiar becomes wondrous again. We begin to see with a child’s eyes.

That renewed vision prepares us for Matthew Harris’s setting of Dylan Thomas’s beloved A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Here, memory transforms one childhood into something universal. Thomas reminds us that the moments we cherish most are often the smallest ones: a snowball, a familiar song, a kitchen full of laughter, a family gathered together while winter waits outside.

As the evening draws to a close, the lens widens once more. Susan Cooper’s The Shortest Day reminds us that these memories belong to a story much older than ourselves. For countless generations, people have welcomed the return of light by decorating their homes with evergreens, lighting candles, feasting with family and friends, telling stories, singing together, and hoping for peace. Across languages, cultures, and faith traditions, each generation has left its own footprints upon winter’s snow.

What begins as one child’s winter becomes our shared human story.

May tonight’s music invite you to remember the stories written across the winters of your own life—and to discover, once again, the wonder of a world made new.

—Jason Iannuzzi, Artistic Director