Category Archives: Christmas

Dec 25 2016
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Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule

Brightest and Best

Some folks open their advent calendar windows in the morning, but we are more of a nighttime household; we like to hold the open window up to a light source in the darkness in order to illuminate the scene within. And tonight, in these wee small hours of Christmas Eve becoming Christmas Day, now that all the company has left, my mom and dad, my sister, my nephews, their wives and their kids… it is again just Seth and me and Haden the cat, here next to me atop a basket beside the Christmas tree. We opened tonight’s advent calendar window––the last of them, now that Christmas is here. The scene is lovely, as is the night.

This time each Christmas Eve, these moments when most of the folks around me are tucked into bed, are each year some of my favorite. Wishes abound this time of year for peace and for joy… and these are the moments when they seem most tangible. It is quiet and the darkness is, as Dylan Thomas wrote, close and holy. The lights we use to illuminate the midwinter night pierce the darkness with warmth. It may have been a month or more of madness leading up to this moment, but now that Christmas is here, there is not much left to do but enjoy its presence.

The nights now are their darkest but our hearts are open and our celebrations all focus on bringing light to that darkness. Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Kwanzaa, all involve candles, all call down the light, all invite us to be a light ourselves, a light in the darkness. And this I wish for you: that you be a light, that you encourage that light in others. Pure and simple.

If I have it in me, and I think I do, I’ll be writing again this year about each of the Twelve Days of Christmas. Just as there is more than one way of reckoning time, there is, as well, more than one way of reckoning these Twelve Days. We subscribe to the notion that Christmas is a season outside ordinary time beginning with Christmas Eve, blossoming into Christmas Day, which then moves into the Twelve Days of Christmas, half of which are in the old year, half in the new. Christmas is just beginning. Sit a spell with us, here in this close and holy darkness, and enjoy it. Merry Christmas.

 

Dec 20 2016
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Advent, Christmas, Solstice, Yule

Darkest Night

And once again the solstice is upon us: winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. We here in Lake Worth are in the Northern, where the nights have been growing longer and longer since our summer solstice in June. Each day a bit more daylight has been shaved off our allotment, and sent to the opposite hemisphere. The great mechanical balance of this, all its immensity: so beautiful, so constant. I am reassured always by this. No matter what is going on in our lives––all our triumphs and our hardships, too––no matter what we do to each other, or how we disrespect this planet we live upon, still it rocks back and forth, still this motion continues. This shifting of the Earth in its cosmic rocking chair is what creates our seasons. It goes on with or without us, as it has since it began and will until it ends.

Here in the North it is the start of winter by the almanac. By traditional reckoning of time, though, winter began with Halloween and with the Days of the Dead and we find ourselves now at the height of winter, it’s midpoint: This is old Midwinter. This is why, in so many churches and in so many homes this time of year, we sing a beautiful old song called “In the Bleak Midwinter.”

The moment of solstice, for those of you who like precision, is 5:44 AM on December 21 here in Lake Worth, which is Eastern Standard Time. The Eastern Time Zone is pretty large, though, and there are ways of determining the solstice moment––of “sun standing still”––with even greater precision should you wish it. In this house, we take a more roundabout approach. Plus 5:44 in the morning is an admittedly odd time of day to celebrate anything. So we will save our celebration for the night of the 21st, with a ceremony small and simple. We’ve been saving last year’s Christmas tree in a corner of the yard all year. It’s been there since we brought it out after Twelfth Night last year, after the Christmastide festivities came to a close. It’s been drying since then, as the days grew longer through spring and summer, and still as the days grew shorter again through fall and the start of winter. Every now and again throughout this past year, we would be blessed with a whiff of pine, a reminder of Christmas, as we passed by or worked near the old tree. That scent an instant portal to memory. On solstice night, we will use wood from that tree to fuel our midwinter fire. For us, it will be in the copper fire bowl outside in the back yard.

Perhaps you, too, have been following our ways and saving your old Christmas tree each year for this purpose. I like to sit there by the fire and imagine our sparks and woodsmoke rising into the air to meet yours, carrying all our wishes and blessings. But maybe you don’t have your old tree, or perhaps you live in a place where a fire is just not possible. Or maybe you simply don’t have it in you to build a fire. It’s okay. My suggestion always is to simply light a candle to mark the night and to take in its blessings. Light it for just a few minutes and then put it out, if you wish. And if you can’t do that, even if you illuminate a lightbulb somewhere and do it in a spirit of connexion with the mechanical clockwork of our immense planet, that, too, is a wonderful thing. Part of the Convivio approach is to not fret over things but to find ceremony where we can. This is what we mean by “the ceremony of a day,” and what better time to put that into practice than this, the shortest day, the longest, darkest night?

 

Image: “Earth at Night.” Released by NASA December 5, 2012, this photo was assembled from multiple shots taken by the Suomi NPP satellite during April and October 2012. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Jan 06 2016
2 Comments
Christmas, Epiphany

Brightest and Best

FatherChristmas

TWELFTH DAY of CHRISTMAS
Epiphany

Do you know the old hymn “Brightest and Best?” I think it’s sometimes called “Star in the East.” No matter what you call it, it is a good song to sing for today, Epiphany: Brightest and best of the sons of the morning; Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid; Star of the East, the horizon adorning, Guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.

That star of the east guided the Magi, and Epiphany marks the day they arrived at the stable in Bethlehem and first beheld the divine child born at Christmas. Tradition tells us the Magi were three wise men: Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior. They each brought a gift to the child, gifts rich with symbolism: Gold for kingship, frankincense for the priesthood, myrrh for death and burial. The manifestation of the child to the Magi represented his manifestation to the broader world: it was no longer a local event.

When I was a boy, Mom would sometimes refer to Epiphany as “Little Christmas,” and this is certainly one good way to look at this unassuming holiday/holyday. It holds a special place in my heart because the passing of Christmas Day always made me a bit melancholy, even as a boy. Epiphany, or Little Christmas, gave me a bit of Christmas to hold on to all the way to the sixth day of January.

Over the years, our traditions for the day have grown to include a bit of practical magic. Some of you may do this, too, and if you don’t, perhaps you should, for magic is powerful stuff, and here is magic anyone can conjure: It is a simple ceremony at the front door, outside on the front porch, to close the celebration of Christmas on Epiphany night. We gather up all who are in the house and we each take turns writing with chalk on the lintel above the front door the numbers and letters and symbols of a traditional inscription. This year, it will read as follows: 20+C+M+B+16. These are the initials of each of the Magi, punctuated by crosses, blanketed on either side by the year. For me, the inscribing is always accompanied by a silent prayer that no one will be missing when we gather next to write this same inscription.

There are some years where the inscription is quickly weathered and by the following Christmas it is there only as a faint ghost of itself. Other years it remains clear as day throughout the year. All the year through, though Christmas be gone, still the inscription is there to remind us of Christmas’s presence as we pass each day through that portal. The inscription is a magic charm of sorts, protecting the house and those who pass through that doorway, harboring the goodwill and spirit of Old Father Christmas.

Tradition tells us that this is the day to take down the Christmas tree. Some, in fact, think it bad luck to leave Christmas decorations up longer than Epiphany, though we don’t subscribe to this notion. We like to return all natural greenery back to nature. Wreaths and garlands can be composted for the garden, and the tree itself we set in a quiet corner of the garden to be saved as the fuel for our Midwinter Solstice fire come next year. It is a ceremonial and respectful way to honor the tree that has been the centerpiece of your Yuletide festivities all these days. So much more honorable than putting it on the trash heap. The pine boughs also make good compostable ground cover around roses (or so I learned from the Sabbathday Lake Shakers, and their gardens are worth emulating). In some circles, folks keep their greenery as cheerful decorations to their homes all the way through Candlemas on the Second of February, when Yule gives way to Imbolc and winter begins its shift to the earliest stirrings of spring.

In early December, before Christmas began, during Advent, we prepared our houses for the guest to come. The guest is the child, but also it is Old Father Christmas: all the traditions of thousands of years, through all the snow white ages. He comes to stay with us for a few short weeks each year, welcome or welcome not. It is right and good that we welcome the guest and when his time with us is done, to send him off into the cold dark night with warmth and kindness and respect. What we send out to the world so returns to us. This I believe and this is at the heart of my respect for the ways of the seasonal round, so as to more firmly connect us to earth and heavens. And each other.

Our Yuletide journey is near complete. Thank you for coming along with me. A few surprises still await: small and quirky celebrations, vestiges of Christmas that will remain for days to come. The first one is tomorrow. I suppose some things never quite end, and this, too, is right and good.

 

Image: “Old Father Christmas,” an illustration from Forrester’s Pictorial Miscellany for the Family Circle, 1855. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

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