Effie Caldarola By Effie Caldarola • Catholic News Service • Posted December 11, 2020 The 19th-century English poet Christina Rossetti had never heard of COVID-19, climate change or many of the woes that beset us in the bleak midwinter of 2020. Yet, in her poem, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” she paints a Christmas scene that endures and brings an odd, consoling joy into these troubled times. She sets the stage for Jesus’s appearance into our chaotic world with these sobering lines, “In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,/ Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.” Not everyone celebrates Christmas in the middle of a hard winter, but for those in the Northern Hemisphere, there are Advent days when ice forms on window panes and chilly winds whip through sullen grey skies.