There is a question that arrives in the post from time to time, written in a child's careful hand, with the letters pressed deep into the paper as though the pen needed anchoring: What do you do in summer? It is one of Mother Christmas's favourite questions. She has answered it, in one form or another, for longer than most mountains have been mountains. And the answer is always the same, and always a little different, because summer at the Northern Keep is a living thing — and living things change, year by year, in small and important ways.
What follows is as close to a true account as words allow. Think of it as a letter from the Keep itself, written in the long golden light of a season that most of the world never sees.
The Midnight Sun Over the Keep
In June, the sun does not set. It circles the sky like a slow, benevolent wheel — dipping towards the horizon around midnight but never quite touching it, sending long copper shadows across the tundra before climbing again, patient and unhurried. The stones of the Northern Keep, which spend most of the year in deep cold, absorb this warmth with something that looks very much like relief. They glow faintly amber in the evening light, as though the building itself is breathing out after a long held breath.
For the scribes, this is the strangest adjustment of all. They are creatures of candlelight and close winter rooms, accustomed to working by the narrow gold of a flame. In summer they open the windows — something that happens only once a year, and is treated accordingly, with ceremony and a certain amount of ceremony-adjacent fuss. The ink dries faster. The pages, which in winter curl slightly at the edges from the damp cold, lie flat and still. A scribe once noted in the margin of a letter that the words seemed easier to find in summer, as though the light loosened them from wherever words are kept.
Mother Christmas walks the Keep in linen during these months. She has a particular coat — pale as sea ice, embroidered at the hem with small silver flowers that no one remembers the name of — that she wears only in summer, and which is aired and refolded and put away again each September with something approaching reverence. She carries her notes in one hand, loose pages covered in her careful script, and she reads them aloud sometimes to no one in particular, the words drifting out across the courtyard and over the low summer hills.
"Summer does not interrupt the care. It deepens it — gives it room to breathe, to notice small things, to write them down before they pass."
What Grows in the Short Arctic Summer
The garden at the Northern Keep is not large. It occupies a south-facing courtyard behind the main hall, sheltered on three sides by stone walls that hold the warmth long after the sun has moved on. In winter it is a rectangle of white, indistinguishable from everything else. But sometime in late May, before you would think it possible, things begin to happen in the soil.
Arctic poppies come first — small, papery, improbably yellow, their petals translucent enough that you can see the light through them if you hold them just so. Then saxifrage, and then the purple spikes of fireweed along the wall, and then, if the summer has been generous, a scattering of something that looks almost exactly like forget-me-nots but smells of pine resin and cold water. No one has ever successfully identified this last plant in any botanical guide. It may be particular to the Keep.
The reindeer are let out into the wider pasture in summer — the tundra opens up, the mosses come through, and there is real grazing to be had. This year's calves were born in May, knock-kneed and enormous-eyed, and by June they were testing their legs on the uneven ground with the focused concentration of children learning something difficult and important. They fall frequently. They get up immediately. There is a lesson in this that Mother Christmas has not yet tired of noticing.
She has written about the garden in letters before — not instructionally, not as a lesson, but the way you mention something to a friend because it happened and it was worth telling. The poppies are out again, she might write, which means summer has arrived, which means you have grown another few weeks older, which is something I like to think about. If you are curious about how those nature notes weave their way into the letters themselves, the full account of what Mother Christmas does throughout the year is a good place to look.
The Letters Change in Summer
December letters carry a particular weight. They are written at speed, in the deep cold, with the knowledge that the year's great turning is almost upon the world. They are full of anticipation and warmth and the particular tenderness of knowing that a child is waiting, that time is short, that this letter must carry something that will sustain.
Summer letters are different. Not lesser — different the way a long walk is different from a sprint. They arrive on ordinary days, which is part of their gift. They have room to notice things: the way the calves have started to lose their spots, the particular quality of light at two in the morning when the sky turns the colour of apricot, the progress of something a child mentioned wanting to learn back in February. Summer letters are the ones that say I remember what you told me, in the way that matters most — not as a performance of memory but as evidence of it, quiet and real.
The scribes work with the windows open. Birdsong comes in. Sometimes a scribe will pause in the middle of a sentence and just listen for a moment, the way you do when something is beautiful and you want to take it in properly before it ends. The letters that come out of these open-windowed mornings have something in them that is hard to name — a lightness, maybe, or a quality of attention that is only possible when the world is not pressing quite so urgently at the glass.
It is worth knowing that the northern lights do not appear in summer — the sky is too bright, and the aurora needs darkness to be seen. But Mother Christmas has said more than once that she feels them still, running under the surface of things, the same quiet electricity that is present in every season if you know where to look. Summer simply makes you look in different places.
So when a child asks, What do you do in summer? — the truest answer is: the same things, in a different light. The letters are written. The garden grows for its brief, brilliant weeks. The calves find their feet. The scribes open their windows. And the care continues, steady and unhurried, through the long golden evenings of the north, waiting patiently, as care does, for winter to come round again.
To discover more about the year-round world of the Northern Keep, our guide to keeping the Christmas magic alive all year long is a gentle companion — and the secret life of Mother Christmas goes deeper still into how the Keep works across every season. When your child is ready to receive their own letters, personalised letters from Mother Christmas arrive every month, through every season.