Category Archives: Solstice

Dec 21 2014
4 Comments
Solstice

The Longest Night

Snow Fields

Tonight at 6:03 PM here in Lake Worth, which is Eastern Standard Time, comes the Winter Solstice. But you don’t need a precise moment in time so much as a sense of wonder and a celebratory spirit to mark this longest night. The longest night is accompanied, by definition, by the shortest day.

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their home with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshines blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us––listen!

So goes “The Shortest Day,” a poem by Susan Cooper that is central to the Christmas Revels each year in Boston. Seth and I got to attend one year when we spent Christmas with his family in Maine. It was a matter of pure serendipity that we happened to be at the Revels on the night of the solstice. It was the year of their Scottish Revels theme, and it was an incredibly special way to welcome Yule. Be that as it may, I think my favorite way to welcome the season is the way Seth and I welcome it now, and I don’t know if it’s our own tradition or if anyone else does the same, but here it is: We take what is left from last year’s Christmas tree, which has been quietly resting in a corner of the garden, and with it we build a fire to bring light to this longest night. Our celebration is outdoors in a copper fire bowl in the back yard, but this is Lake Worth, where our nights are generally mild, even this time of year, and even if there is a chill in the air, the fire is there to warm us. In more northern places, a fire with last year’s Christmas tree could be built in the fireplace. It is, to us, a sacred way to mark the passing years and to honor the trees that bring us such joy each Christmas. So much more honorable than tossing the tree at the roadside for the trash pickup.

It is this night that really welcomes in the Christmas season for us. We will sit by our fire with those who will join us and we will pass around something warm to drink, most likely St. Bernardus or Baladin Nora, two wintry spiced ales, or maybe some mulled wine. I think the spice is important, for ginger, cloves and cinnamon light fire within; so outside so inside. In the house, this year’s tree will be illuminated. We bought it just two nights ago at the tree lot at Yamato Road and US-1, from the same people we’ve been buying our tree from for years and years. They remember us, we remember them, we see them once each year and it is part of the ritual.

You can take part, too, even if you don’t have last year’s Christmas tree. Light a fire, or light a candle if you don’t have a place to light a fire, bring some light of your own to this longest night of the year. These are busy days, I know, but I guarantee you a quiet ritual like this will find and occupy a place in your memory for a long time, whereas the rest will fall by the wayside. Tonight also happens to be the Fourth Sunday of Advent, in which we light all four candles in the round of our advent wreath. Three purple candles and one rose: all four candles are lit and that signifies that Christmas, the old welcome guest, is soon to be with us.

And so raise your glass with us if you care to, or speak a quiet prayer softly to the dark and holy night. Light, now, begins its gradual return. Happy Midwinter. Welcome Yule.

 

Image: Snow Fields (Winter in the Berkshires) by Rockwell Kent. Oil on canvas, 1909. [Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.]

 

Jun 24 2014
5 Comments
Midsummer, Solstice, St. John's Day

St. John’s Day

St_John_the_baptist_-_Leonardo_Da_Vinci

Solstice celebrations have a long history… all the way back to prehistory, in fact. And you can count on things like this, handed down through the generations, to be fiercely protected. And so it was with people and the early Church as entire empires and city-states began converting to Christianity in those formative years. Old ways persisted a long time and still do, but the early Church opted to rededicate many of these celebrations. The Church placed the birth of Jesus Christ at the winter solstice and the birth of John the Baptist, who prepared his way, at the summer solstice, keeping those solstice celebrations in place but repurposing them to the celebrations we honor today.

Consider the imagery: John is born at Midsummer, just as light begins to decrease. “He must increase, but I must decrease,” we read in John 3:30. Conversely, Christ is born at Midwinter, just as light begins to increase. Again, in John 8:12: “I am the light of the world.” No one knows for sure the exact dates of birth of these two historical figures, but the Church knew what it was doing when it chose these dates, there’s no doubt. The message is a powerful one, especially when you go back to simpler times, before electricity: We were much more attuned to the patterns of increasing and decreasing sunlight in the past.

Most of the Midsummer traditions have to do with St. John’s Eve, which was last night. Still, one tradition is to cut divining rods on this day. Hidden treasures are also thought to reveal themselves on St. John’s Day (perhaps St. Anthony’s influence from earlier in the month?). Explore lonely places, it is said, and there these treasures shall be, awaiting any lucky finder. The magic passes with the day.

St. John the Baptist is unusual in that he is the only saint for which we celebrate his birth (today) in addition to his death (August 29). So you’ll see his name come around again in late summer. St. John is sacred to Puerto Rico, Québec and Newfoundland. He is a patron saint of tailors, innkeepers, and printers like me. It is customary to eat strawberries on his feast day, and in Estonia and Finland, a special St. John’s Day cheese is made, flavored with caraway seeds. Luckily no one has made a tradition of eating the foods that St. John himself is known to have eaten: “And his meat was locusts and wild honey” (Matthew 3:4). Try serving that at your next Midsummer dinner and watch your guests clear out in a hurry.

As with Christmas at the opposite solstice, it is the eve of the feast that is charged with more magic and mystery. And especially so with St. John’s Eve. The fires of people across the planet were blazing last night, lighting the midsummer night, calling down the power of the sun, marking our celebrations across time and geography.

 

Image: St. John the Baptist by Leonardo DaVinci [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Jun 23 2014
3 Comments
Midsummer, Solstice, St. John's Eve

Midsummer Night’s Dreaming

Juhannusjuhlat

And now it is Old Midsummer: St. John’s Eve. It is a night that will go by unnoticed by most Americans, but in other cultures it is the beginning of the midsummer revels with good food, storytelling, divination and games, and, most especially, bonfires. This is especially true in Scandinavia, where the days at this time of year are particularly long. In Helsinki, the sun will shine for nearly 19 hours today. The sun has just passed its northernmost point in the sky with the solstice two days ago, and already it is progressing toward the opposite of that. Come December, that 19 hours in Helsinki will be of darkness. And in these Lands of the Midnight Sun, these lands of polar opposites, a celebration marking each of these events should come as no surprise.

While we in the States (at least in the Lower 49) are all too familiar with the celebration surrounding the Winter Solstice, the celebration of St. John’s Eve and St. John’s Day at the summer solstice has never gained much of a foothold here. My partner’s cousin married a woman from Sweden and they settled in California and when Ulrika’s first St. John’s Eve in the States arrived, she was pretty disappointed. Yes, she could create a celebration of her own, but part of the charm of most St. John’s Eve celebrations is the communal atmosphere. Folks from the community typically gather and celebrate together, outdoors in the night filled with sunlight, at a communal bonfire, and there was none of that for Ulrika in California.

Even here in Lake Worth, where businesses like Polar Bakery and Midnight Sun Motel are signs of the largest community of Finns outside of Finland, not much will be happening tonight that I am aware of. There was a bonfire on Saturday, the night of the solstice this year, at the American-Finnish Community Club west of town. But that was on Saturday and tonight, as far as I know, the field out behind the Club will remain dark.

Community or not, the power to celebrate a day is within each of us. Lighting a fire in your own backyard fire pit or even just lighting a candle is, I think, a fine way of honoring this ancient celebration. I hope Ulrika is doing at least as much. I hope she is serving pickled herring and new potatoes with sour cream, and eating strawberries by the fire, all part of the traditions in her Swedish homeland.

In other parts of Europe, St. John’s Eve is a night to go and gather fern seed for its magical properties. Gathered at the proper time, fern seed was thought to confer the power of invisibility upon the person who held it. Gathering it comes not without some peril, however: the seeds are fiercely guarded by the fairy folk. Be that as it may, this is the only night to do so for their magical properties. And of course the gathering of St. John’s Wort would be done tonight. Hang a clump of this herb at windows and doors to keep evil away.

As with Christmas in December, it is the eve that is the period of the holiday that is more charged with magic and mystery. And for St. John’s Eve, no one has done a better job of conjuring that magic than William Shakespeare. His comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set on this night and tunes into folk belief that the portals between worlds are more easily transgressed on nights just like this. There is no better time of year to read his play again or to watch the film (the 1999 adaptation by Michael Hoffman, starring Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania and Rupert Everett as Oberon is really quite good), and if you are in a place where the play is being performed tonight, well, you should not even think twice about what to do: go.

Even if all you do is eat a fresh strawberry, do something to mark this magical night, and if you can, do it outdoors. To take part in marking this night is to take part in something bigger than ourselves, bigger than our problems and cares. It is to take part in the community of folks marking this night across the centuries, and that is community indeed. Happy Midsummer.

 

Image: Last year’s solstice bonfire at the American-Finnish Community Club. Even in the heat of a Florida summer night, we love a good bonfire.

 

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