Festivals of Light

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         It was always a special time, fraught with danger, filled with hope. It was a time to draw in, protect, preserve. But also a time to feast and celebrate and pray. Winter is the pause in life’s trajectory when we take a deep breath, grateful we have arrived and hopeful we will continue. Animals hibernate. Fields lay dormant. And our ancestors looked to the heavens and measured the days, watching the sun settle on the horizon each day and diminish its life in the sky.

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        The winter solstice was marked and celebrated early in our past, at Stonehenge on the plains of Salisbury, at Woodhenge’s Cahokia Mounds on the prairies of Illinois, and at Chaco Canyon in the desert southwest, where the Anasazi marked the rising sun on its shortest day. As winter food storage began to dwindle, for both humans and livestock, animals were slaughtered and feasts held to prepare for the coming famine.

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        At the same time, the solstice signaled the sun's rebirth, as the cycle of life was renewed. It is no coincidence that religious festivals are common during this time. The Birth of Christ has been celebrated in late December since the fourth century and many related festivals across Christendom have followed, including Las Posadas in Mexico and in parts of our southwest.

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        The sun’s renewal was central to Rome’s cult of the sun god, celebrated on December 25, the day of the solstice in the Roman calendar. The festival had degraded slowly into the secular—and frenzied—Saturnalia when the emperor Constantine decreed that date to commemorate the birth of Christ. “Hence it is,” wrote St. Augustine, “that He was born on the day which is the shortest in our earthly reckoning and from which subsequent days begin to increase in length.”

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        Festivals of light in the darkness of winter are traditions inherent to many faiths, including Ramadan and Eid in Islam, Hanukkah in Judaism, and Diwali in various Indian faiths—including Hindu and Buddhist.

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        While the commercial influence of winter festivals has become a worldwide phenomenon, their more solemn origins—both sacred and secular—continue to anchor the lives of many of us caught in the spin of seasons. It’s a frame of mind.

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Ron Wetherington