Heap on more wood!—the wind is chill;
But let it whistle as it will,
We’ll keep our Christmas merry still.

These lines are spoken during a Christmas gathering in Walter Scott’s narrative poem *Marmion* (1808). In the poem’s Sixth Canto, Scott pauses the martial story to depict a warm, communal holiday scene at Tantallon Castle, contrasting the harsh winter weather outside with the conviviality and hospitality within. The call to “heap on more wood” evokes the practical realities of keeping a great hall warm, while the insistence on remaining “merry still” reflects the period’s ideal of Christmas as a time of feasting, song, and fellowship despite external hardship. The passage has often been excerpted in later Christmas anthologies.

The speaker acknowledges the cold and the “chill” wind, but treats it as something that can be met with human warmth—literally by feeding the fire, and figuratively by sustaining good cheer. The lines dramatize a familiar Romantic-era contrast: nature’s severity versus the shelter of community and tradition. “Let it whistle as it will” suggests stoic defiance; the weather may do its worst, but it cannot dictate the spirit of the household. As a Christmas quotation, it has endured because it frames festivity not as denial of hardship, but as a chosen resilience enacted through shared ritual and hospitality.