I’ve got a couple of holiday trivia questions for you. Who knows precisely when solstice is (or was) this year?
It was yesterday, yes…Dec. 21st. But more specifically, if we’re getting fancy about it? It was yesterday at 3:21am CST.
Here’s another holiday question…Are Yuletide and Winter Solstice the same thing? Not exactly. Yuletide is a celebration that takes place over the 12 days.
It begins on the eve of the Winter Solstice and ends at New Years.
Now, you might be thinking, “I expected a Christmas question in there, if we’re talking about holiday trivia questions.”
Often people, especially Christmas celebrators with Christian backgrounds, don’t think of Winter Solstice as a holiday/holy day. A lot of folks recognize it correctly as a pagan observance, but not necessarily a holy day.
To strip it of its holiday/holy day-ness is, I think, an oversight.
It seems to me that Yuletide Solstice and Christmas are not only first cousins, but are more like parent/child, or even conjoined twins with the same heart.
Let’s take a closer look at why.
The word “yule,” stemming from the Old English word geol – referring to a pagan midwinter festival that took place in December – is older than the word “Christmas” by hundreds of years.
Check out some more of these old Yule traditions from around the world and see if they don’t sound strikingly familiar.
We mentioned that Yuletide is a 12-day celebration, so you can guess where our ‘12 Days of Christmas’ true love-giving came from.
Also, in Scandinavia the Vikings hailed the period of jól with feasts and celebrations, including the tradition of the pagan god Odin riding an eight-legged horse across the night sky to visit everyone’s houses.
Sound similar to any modern-day Christmas lore you can think of??
Saturnalia was a Roman pagan festival held between Dec. 17 and Dec. 21 to celebrate the god Saturn, and included gift-giving and feasting. Uh-huh.
And here are some basic “Yule” associations found generally across the board in pagan Yule-celebrating settings, also currently customary in our culture:
- Dates: Late December
- Theme Colors: Green, red, white, gold, silver
- Plants: mistletoe, holly evergreens
- Instruments: drums, bells, choirs
Here’s another detail some of us may not know.
Ever heard the name Mithras? Mithras was another god, who the ancient civilizations of Persia, India Greece, and Rome considered to be a solar deity.
Any guesses about when his birthday was celebrated You got it… December 25 (long before Jesus appeared on the horizon).
So now fast forward, and Jesus arrives. Give it another 3-4 centuries and we have a new fledging faith of followers who have to figure out what their celebrations are going to be.
The followers of Jesus had two options…put the kibosh on these non-Jesus traditions, or rework and relabel them. It’s pretty obvious what they chose…instead of getting rid of the pagan gods, they gave people a new deity to focus on and borrowed a lot of the details to create a ‘new’ way of celebrating.
Most of it pre-dated Jesus, but not all.
For example… once upon a 4th Century time there was a well-loved monk named Nicholas of Myra (what is now Turkey) who had a reputation for gift-giving. He was sometimes known to give gifts secretly, like stashing coins in a person’s shoes that had been left out.
His generosity helped him to achieve sainthood in the early church, thus becoming known as… Saint Nicholas.
The emergence of what we know as our Beloved Old Saint Nick went from Sint-Nicolaas to Sinterklaas, and finally, to Santa Claus.
One more point from our Christmas heritage has to do with our favorite holiday plant, the poinsettia.
These lovely plants were used by the Aztecs in medicine, dyes, cooking, and celebrations such as Winter Solstice, where they symbolized their sun god.
Hundreds of years later, Franciscan friars started using them in nativity processions in Mexico. [As an aside, did we all know that St. Francis was the original creator of the Nativity scene?]
Anyway, about a hundred years ago a U.S. Diplomat named Joel Poinsett saw the flower in a church in Mexico on Christmas Eve.
He brought some back to the states, and his botanist named the previously nicknamed “Mexican Fire Plant” the “poinsettia” after this statesman.
All these little details of history lay the groundwork for our holy days.
Time for another trivia question. Does anyone know what wassailing is? Wassailing was an ancient custom originating in England with apple farmers. Groups of people would travel from orchard to orchard, singing songs as they went, giving birth to our modern-day Christmas caroling.
It is from this term that we have the famous Christmas song “Here We Come A‐Wassailing.” Just for fun, let’s take a moment to sing it together. The lyrics will be on the screen.
One might hear all of these historical data points (again, many of which pre-date Jesus) and feel deflated, as if they somehow trivialize the specialness Jesus’ arrival and all that it encompasses.
I don’t know about you, but in my experience sometimes people feel uneasy with the thought of pagan observances because they represent ungodliness, a departure from their vision of how it was and is, and (most important) should be.
I feel the opposite. I feel energized by the universality that it represents.
I like the idea of a shared lifeline, a mutual heartbeat, an in-common-ness fundamental to a Beloved Community of humanity that spans the chapters of our world’s history.
These commonalities connect us with our ancestors, from whence we come.
The human spirit – our thirsting for God and yearning for rituals to assist us in connecting us to that which we hold sacred – I love this being timeless and boundless.
We, gathered here, have a special love for Jesus. As our belief statement notes: We also see God through the window of Jesus, a human being like us, who showed us how to put God’s love to work in our world.
This love, God’s love embodied by Jesus, is the love expressed in the hearts of Yuletide celebrators through the ages.
I think Jesus would agree. I can imagine him saying, “Where there is wisdom, may our attention be there.”
One aspect of Yuletide that holds tremendous wisdom is the emphasis of stillness…in the stillness of Solstice, the quiet dormancy of the winter.
Winter officially arrived in the dark early morning hours of yesterday.
Katharine Kay says that, in our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter.
This actually makes me think of COVID. Although it started in early spring and spanned a winter or two, the entire pandemic period was one that called us into a wintertime state of less movement.
The table was set by that pecky little virus for us to step away from the tread-mill and into the more-still.
Several a sermon did I deliver about this sideways gift, which is monumental if you look at it from this angle, and even more so if you capitalized on it.
A dear friend of mine, Wendy, did just that. Unwittingly, I might add.
Wendy lives in the suburbs of Chicago. She and her husband Mike are professionals, their home is lovely, and is put together just-so by Wendy.
I’ve known her for going on three decades, and in all of my dog-loving time as her close friend, she always maintained that there’s no way she’d have a animal in her home.
Sometimes she’d add that it escaped her understanding how anybody would invite such a filth-maker into their personal living space.
Then COVID hit, and there was a lot of time spent at home…much more stillness. The idea of a dog came up. At first it was shut down by the Queen of the Manor.
The months wore on, the stillness still imposed. And her heart began to soften. She sat with it. She discerned. In the process her heart (like the Grinch’s) grew in size.
Finally she decided to take the leap. They’ve had little Effie for a couple of years now, and Wendy can’t imagine her life without this source and presence of love.
The fruits of winter-like quiet, even if we don’t choose it, are far-reaching.
About the season of winter, Katherine Kay goes on to say, “We don’t ever dare to feel its full bite, but we must stop trying to ignore it or dispose of it. It is real, and it is asking something of us.”
She continues by saying,
Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, it’s the crucible.
Some of us are lovers of winter, appreciating the beauty of a snowfall, the activities of sledding or ice fishing, the festivities of the holidays.
Others of us are decidedly not fans, loving more the light and its warmth, disenchanted with the cold, short days, and potentially hazardous precipitations.
A lesson that I have only recently begun to embrace is deeply appreciating the dance, the balance of the two.
Light bowing to darkness, the darkness uplifting light.
And isn’t that reflective of our own creation? To borrow from Gary Kowalski’s words…
At the center of our being
there is light and there is darkness,
the known and the unknown,
the named and the nameless,
the finite and the infinite.
Light and dark are different,
but not opposed to each other.
Like a two separate parents, they are friends with
one another, and with us.
The light part is coming. But the darkness now draws its quiet arms around us.
Therefore, before moving into our reflection responses, we will share in a time of meditative stillness by hearing the words of Linda Hart in a piece she entitled Open to the Blessed Darkness.
Feel free to take a moment and get yourself comfortably relaxed in your seat. I invite you to close your eyes, or perhaps rest your gaze on the candle’s flame. Take a deep breath in, let it out slowly, and bring yourself as fully as you can to this very time and place.
Bring your presence, open your spirit, to soulfully experience these words:
In the quiet of these moments, let us take a common breath, unclench, and open to each other and the holy one we call by many names:
We arrive in these moments bearing the whole of our lives: We bring with us the worries and troubles of our days, sometimes overwhelming, loss beyond words, pain and struggle known only in the deepest place in our hearts.
Here in the quiet, joined with each other, may we release our hearts from them, find a moment of peace.
We come to these moments with the freshness of love, the grace of small treasures, with hope and faith, knowing well the promise of the dawning day, even in the longest of nights.
Here in the quiet, may we lift up our hearts in gratitude for the gifts of our lives, pausing in thanksgiving.
It is written that to everything there is a season, and in our hearts we know that it is true.
As the earth spirals in the solstice, let us open to the blessed darkness, praising renewal that comes as the light slowly returns.
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