A happy midwinter to all who celebrate.
The aurora shimmers in the inky sky, green beams arcing and swaying above the smoking crater of Mt Erebus. The ice cracks and groans. It is 22 June 1911, the midpoint of the long, dark polar night.
Inside the hut at Cape Evans, the 25 men of the Terra Nova shore party have prepared a feast: seal consommé, followed by roast beef with Yorkshire puddings and Brussels sprouts. There is a flaming plum pudding for dessert, champagne, cigars, Antarctic caviar, candied fruit.
Outside it’s -36°C. Inside, the hut is warm and draped with flags. A gramophone plays lively tunes. Dinner is followed by speeches and toasts to the success of the expedition, now at its halfway point. Scotsman Henry Bowers emerges bearing an enormous Christmas tree. Constructed with split bamboo and a ski pole, it is decorated with feathers and flaming candles, “gaudy crackers”, and toys for all. Lawrence Oates receives a pop-gun and proceeds to “shoot” everybody, proclaiming, “If you want to please me very much you will fall down when I shoot you!”
Expedition leader Robert Scott concludes his diary entry for the day: “We celebrated the birth of a season, which for weal or woe, must be numbered amongst the greatest in our lives.” Less than a year later, he would perish—along with Oates, Bowers, petty officer Edgar Evans and chief scientist Edward Wilson—on the march back from the South Pole.
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Midwinter Day has become a tradition for all “Antarcticans” who overwinter—a de facto cultural holiday on the icy continent. The Christmas-inspired celebration began with Scott’s 1902 Discovery expedition: they feasted extravagantly on turtle soup, mince pies, jellies, gifts and singing.
Today’s midwinter feasts are an opportunity to showcase New Zealand cuisine, says Scott Base chef Paddy Rietveld. Think venison and salmon. The 2025 menu is still in the works. “I’m thinking for dessert some sort of tiramisu base, some sort of honey mascarpone-type jobbie,” he says. Rietveld usually gets inspiration from a theme—last year, it was a solstice-Matariki crossover. This year, the big dinner is held a little earlier, so as not to clash with the Americans at nearby McMurdo Station. “It actually falls on Friday the 13th, so we’re thinking ‘formal goth’,” says Rietveld. He will be cooking for 40—the Scott Base crew, plus invited guests from McMurdo. “It’s like Christmas dinner, but with your Antarctic family,” says Paul Woodgate, long-serving logistics manager for Antarctica New Zealand.
Midwinter Day also sees bases all over the continent exchanging greetings and silly team photos—back in the 1980s, when Woodgate first overwintered, they were limited to Telex, a system of messages tapped out over phone lines. Nowadays, it’s email. “There’s something about Antarctica that is universally bonding, regardless of nationality or language,” says Anthony Powell, who has overwintered in the frozen south 10 times. Some of his Midwinter Days have featured raging blizzards, others “mind-blowing” auroras that “feel like the whole sky is opening and coming to swallow you up”.
Powell also volunteered to help with another Midwinter Day tradition: the polar plunge. This involved a couple of days’ work cutting a hole in the ice and setting up a safety ladder. “I’d always make sure people were wearing shoes, so their feet wouldn’t stick to the ice,” he says. But Powell never partook in the plunge himself: “I personally regard it as a bit of an IQ test.”
The plunges got nixed for health and safety reasons more than 10 years ago. “But the Australians still do it,” says Woodgate. “They’re further north—the Club Med of Antarctica.”
Some traditions persist off-ice. The New Zealand Antarctic Society still hosts midwinter dinners for Antarcticans, bonded by the weekslong night, bone-chilling storms and aurora-lit icescapes.
