Category Archives: Holidays

Aging, Holidays

2012

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Winter (snow, at last!)                           First Moon of the New Year

OK.  I stayed up until midnight.  Now what?

Another year.  Didn’t we just do this last year?  The whole new year’s thing.

Kate and I shared champagne flutes of a Fre sparkling wine, toasted her retirement, our family and friends, the next year together, our 22nd as a married couple and then she went to bed, she who usually goes to be around 8pm stayed up until 11:30.

We watched a Netflix streaming movie, Mao’s Last Dancer, a so so movie about a Chinese ballet dancer who chose to stay in the US after a year with the Houston Ballet.  This was the mid-80’s.  The movie barely makes sense in current time.  China’s much different, more confident and we’re much different, less confident.

So, Happy New Year to each of you and all of you, all at once!

Holidays

Boxing Day

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Winter                                           Moon of the New Year

So, Boxing Day has arrived.  Like most Americans Boxing Day has always puzzled me.  My image of it, for a very long time, was of proper British folk picking up the mess from Christmas day.  That had something to do with boxes and it would logically happen the day after Christmas.

Close?  Nope.  Not at all.  Traditionally this was a time when the quality would give gifts to their servants.  A sort of after-Christmas Christmas for those on the other side of the baize door.  In America, I learned from Wikipdedia, retailers give Boxing Day gifts to persons involved in delivery of goods.  This gift usually includes a fifth of Scotch.

Wikipedia, as good a source as any on this topic, says the term may have arisen from metal boxes outside churches in early Rome, money dedicated to St. Stephen and distributed to the poor on his Saint Day, the 26th of December.  Or, more likely to me, it comes from the quality giving servants the day after Christmas off in return for their Christmas running smoothly.  Servants were often given boxes of food and gifts to take as they traveled to see their families.

Whatever the rationale or tradition, it is now upon us, so… Happy Boxing Day!

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story

Solstice Celebrations. What Might They Mean?

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Winter                                  Moon of the Winter Solstice

Something new seems to be happening.  Not sure if I’m reading the rustling in the ether of our culture right, but it feels like the Great Wheel may have begun to reemerge.  Not in a Wiccan or alt-pagan way, though that’s certainly there, but in a from the ground up way (so to speak).

A friend called me tonight to wish me a salubrious solstice.  Kate wants to do a fire tonight. First Universalist has a solstice celebration as do many UU congregations.  There has been, for a while now, solstice celebrations on the continent.  I’m most familiar with ones in Scotland and Sweden.

These celebrations, rituals whatever we might call them are not confined to the Winter Solstice though the spreading knowledge of Christmas’s relationship to the Saturnalia, itself a winter solstice holiday, has given the Winter Solstice a cultural leg up, as has a more general appreciation for the other festivals of light around this time:  Deepavali, Hanukkah, Christmas trees and home decorating–neither one of which has any obvious link with the Christian holiday.

I don’t know quite how to go about measuring the cultural penetration of solstice and equinox awareness, or the depth of its relation to individual’s religious yearnings, but my own sensibilities suggest the penetration has gone far past the surface and has, for some folks, like myself, reached the point of religious sentiment.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in a somewhat ham-fisted way, changed its holiday traditions focus from a sort of Victorian dress up for Christmas to what is now called a Winter Lights celebration.

I’d be interested to know what you think, what you see from your standpoint.

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story

Winter Solstice 2011

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Winter                                           Moon of the Winter Solstice

Darkness has fallen.  The solstice has begun.  The longest nights of the year occur over the next few days.

The summer solstice, now a half year away in either direction on our orbit around Sol, has faded, faded, faded until the longest day of the year has become the longest night; in the other direction, toward which we move, the summer solstice is a half year away.

Starting now, we will begin, second by second, minute by minute, then hour by hour to turn ourselves toward the light until, at the moment of light’s triumph on June 20th at 6:09 pm, we will begin again a sure glide into winter.

On the Great Wheel it is neither the longest night nor the longest day by itself that matters, rather it is the certainty of their coming, light followed by increasing darkness, darkness followed by increasing light.  This reality, as metaphor, reminds us that no light is so fulsome that it is without darkness and no darkness so total as to be without light.

Too, we can see our lives as a turn of the wheel. In late winter we quicken, growing small within the mother.   We emerge during Beltane, the sun’s heat and the day’s length increases and we mature, grown into adults, as the turn moves toward Mabon and Samain, summer’s end.  Our lives develop fruit and we harvest; as Summer’s End moves toward the Winter Solstice, our hair turns gray and our bodies decline.  In Winter we move toward the darkness, back to the enveloping womb that is our mother, the earth.

Tonight we celebrate the winter season of our lives, the time when our life finishes its run.  This bears no sorrow, nor any fear, since we know that on the morrow, as it has since time begun, the light will again gain strength.  Living or not, it will shine on us, too.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story, Travel

The Dark Time

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Samain                                   Moon of the Winter Solstice

Samain in Lima, Peru.  We came back through Lima from a point on the far side of the city just as evening fell.  Even there, Samain’s pale memory, Halloween, saw children in Mickey Mouse costumes, princess costumes, carrying plastic pumpkins, many of them walking toward a large shopping mall in one area, a Halloween party rocking the joint.

These Latin cultures have a certain affinity with Samain as a festival when the veil between the worlds thins and the dead can cross, come back to visit family or to haunt them.  Cemeteries had fresh flowers at grave markers, grass had been cut, masses said, loved ones remembered.  In the White City, the vast and prominent cemetery in Guyaquil, Ecuador, the mausoleums and the multiple, tall columbariums, the markers climbing the hill in the back all speak to an engagement with death, a sort of living and ongoing engagement with death, so very different from the sterile, hospital based, don’t look culture we’ve created here.

Next week, a week from Wednesday, comes the Winter Solstice and Samain will be at an end.  In sorting material about the Winter Solstice, about Yule, about Saturnalia and even Deepavali and Hanukkah the emphasis is mainly on Sol Invictus, as the Romans called him, the Unconquerable Sun.  An emphasis on the long march of daylight that begins on the longest night.

Another, equal concept celebrates the Winter Solstice as the longest night of the year, the culmination of a steady progress by darkness to push back the realm of light.  Both have their mirror in the human mind.  The light of reason shines itself on the questions we have about the way things are.  How things work.  Why this happens and that does not.  Yes.

But.  A child lives in the warm dark for nine months before coming to the light.  Ideas often lie hidden, tucked away somewhere in the darkness of the mind, back there fermenting, gathering weight.  Dreams sometimes pick those ideas up and play with them.  Too, our life is not all rational, not all light, perhaps not even very much so.

Most of life comes from the irrational, the emotional, the intuitive and to worship the light can be a denial of these important elements in our everyday life.

The Great Wheel shows us the way.  We need the fallow time, the restfulness of winter and the cold, just as we need the sunny time, the growing season, the time of thinking.  These needs are not occasional but persistent, coming into our lives again and again and again just as the earth wheels through the sky, repositioning the sun’s light.  Blessed be.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Holidays, Humanities, Weather +Climate

Hello, Darkness

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Samain                                   Moon of the Winter Solstice

The holidays.  We’ve got no decorations up.  No Christmas or other holiday music plays here.  We did all of our shopping online.

When I was at Best Buy a week or so ago while hunting for a device to download pictures to Kate’s i-pad (no joy on that front even now), Christmas music played and, as I said here after that, I responded, singing along, even getting the little uptick in the heart that comes with the commercial or family holiday all Americans celebrate at this time of year.

I do miss some of the over doing, present wrapping–ok, I don’t miss present wrapping, decorating the tree–well, I don’t miss getting the tree, putting up the tree or the occasional nasty surprise like the one my friend Mark discovered when he watered and watered this year’s tree only to discover the pan had cracked and water had leaked out under the tree skirt, nor do I miss taking down the tree, cleaning up the fallen needles, Christmas music–responding in the store meant something to me, but only because I’d spent 40 days away from the US and this is one strong cultural tradition, over saturation spoils the effect, church services–well, I bailed on those a long, long time ago.

So, maybe I’m not too sad about our ascetic approach to the holidays.  Besides, the holiday that now means the most to me, the Winter Solstice, comes along now, too, and I do celebrate that one with candles, meditation and writing.

There is, though, a powerful need for reflection, for love, for warmth in all its manifestations.  Sergio, our guide on a tour in Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the Americas, explained that winters there, where the nights are long long long, often results in depression.

Another argument for a Ge-centric faith, one that acknowledges the darkness, relishes its nurturing power, rejoices at the return of the light and doesn’t have to get overly metaphysical about it.

These brave festivals of the light like Deepavli, Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule and even New Years all respond to the same fundamental astronomical fact, the lengthening of night and the ancient fear that the sun may not return.  In that sense they’re all good, but why not acknowledge, first, the fundamental reason for the season, axial tilt?

Bees, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities, Hydroponics, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics

Reimagine

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Samain                          Moon of the Winter Solstice

Jon sent these two links.  Wish I’d had’em when I owned that farm up near Nevis, Minnesota.  I might still be up there, motoring around on some of these very clever inventions.  They show what an ingenious mind can do when rethinking what appear to be over and done with ideas.

http://opensourceecology.org/
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/marcin_jakubowski.html

Makes me wonder what other ideas need a complete rethink.  Computers have followed a pretty standard architecture up to now, one based on a central processing unit.  I read an article in Scientific American last week about a neural computer which, in essence, gives each unit of a computer a cpu, allowing for massively parallel processing as an integral part of the design. It’s modeled on, but not attempting to replicate, the human brain.

How about housing?  Cars?  Or, my personal quest and long time obsession, religion?  The family?  Electrical generation?  I’m interested in distributed generation where a cul de sac or an apartment building or a couple of blocks city residential units might get their electricity from, say, a combination of wind, solar and geo-thermal units sited in their immediate vicinity.

Here’s another one that could use a complete overhaul, reimagining:  nations.  The nation state is a relatively new phenomenon, most experts date its rise somewhere around 1800, perhaps a hundred years earlier in the instance of Portugal and the Netherlands.  In the wake of the globalization of economic life national boundaries have much different meanings that they did, say, 50 years ago.

Let’s go back to religion for a second.  Over the last several years, 23 to be exact, I’ve wrestled with the hole left by Christianity in my life and sought to fill it through what I call a tactile spirituality, one wedded to the rhythms of the seasons, of flowers and vegetables, of bees.  This direction took its initial impetus from an immersion in Celtic lore while I sifted for writing topics.

Then, I began to follow the Great Wheel of the seasons, a Celtic sacred calendar focused on 8 seasons, rather than four.  That led me to integrate gardening with my sacred calendar.  In the wake of these two changes in my life, I began to see the vegetative and wild natural world as more than tools for food or leisure, rather I began to see that they were my home, that I lived with them and in them, rather than having them as adjuncts to my anthropocentric life.

This whole change, this rethink of what sacred and holy mean, what the locus of my spirituality is and where it is, has had a long maturation, much thought and experimentation.  My hope is that my reimagining might provide a common religious base, a sort of ur-religion, which all humans everywhere can embrace.

As in times past this base religion could certainly have others layered on top of it, its essence after all is to be non-exclusive.  What I hope further is that reasserting, inviting, even luring others to see the sacred and the holy in our planet and its other living beings, they will be more likely to join in to see it healthy and vital.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Holidays, Retirement

Socialized Medicine, Here I Come

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Samain                      Moon of the Winter Solstice

The end of the day.  Sunday.  Used to go to sleep on Sunday night with Monday whirring away, chattering and buzzing, cutting a channel through my attempts to sleep.  Now I go to sleep on Sunday night.  That’s all.

Granddaughter Ruth has the makings of a cook.  Maybe.  Her recipe for cooking a turkey:  put it in the oven at 10 degrees, cook it for half an hour.  Put it on a big plate and put green beans and potatoes beside it.  Sounds like my first attempts at cooking a turkey.

Speaking of retirement.  Didn’t somebody bring that up?  I go to sign up for Medicare tomorrow.  I have my Medicare card already and now have to choose a plan.  Kathryn Giegler will help me as she did Kate.  This is a rite of passage, analogous to getting a driver’s license or that first Social Security check.

When I went on a quest tonight to solve a computer problem, I ended up in Best Buy where Christmas music played over the loudspeakers.  I found myself cheered by it, rather than annoyed.  It felt familiar, comfortable, mine.  This surprised me.  A Grinch I’m not, but I’ve often found the commercial side of the holiday season a large, unwelcome mosquito that won’t quit buzzing into my awareness no matter how often I try to swat it away.

Instead I found myself thinking of roasting chestnuts, singing carols, making a roaring fire and having hot chocolate.  Geez.

Holidays, Memories, Minnesota, Travel

Yeah, You Betcha

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Samain                        Moon of the Winter Solstice

Went out on an errand this afternoon as the sun began to set.  At 4:00 pm.  When I hit Round Lake, I saw a car in the rear view.  It had something on top.  A Christmas tree.  We have one of the metro’s favorite cut your own tree places about 6 miles north of us.

This triggered two memories.  The first, which you’ve encountered if you’ve traveled in the tropics during Christmas, is the jarring sight of Christmas trees, wreaths and lights all atwinkle at 80+ degrees.  In Rio they have applied to Guiness for certification of their floating Christmas tree in the big lake near the funicular for Corcovada (muy grande Jesus).  It’s supposed to be the biggest.  Among a crop of how many floating Christmas trees, I wonder?

An oddity I realized in Rio was that most of these Christmas decorations have a fir or pine as their exemplars.  That was the trigger with the Christmas tree on the car.  When I took my trip to Southeast Asia seven years ago, I was in Singapore at this time.  Same strange thing.  Christmas trees, wreaths, Christmas tree decorations all sprouting from vertical shopping malls in the air conditioned nation.

The second memory triggered by the car with the Christmas tree was the sight of golf carts all loaded up on flat bed trucks headed south for the winter season.  Soon we’ll have the rickety trucks coming to town piled high with cut wood sold door to door for fire places.

We do have a very distinct culture here and it’s visible to me right now, with South America so present to me.

One guy on the cruise asked me about ice fishing.  Seems the word of our palatial fish houses has spread to the larger world.

Yeh, you betcha, we’re our own culture up here.  For sure.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story

Fall Equinox

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Fall                                                     Waning Harvest Moon

Meteorological fall begins on September 1st, but the ritual calendar of many earth focused traditions places the beginning of fall at the moment when the sun’s equator and the earth’s align, the earth, just for a moment, losing its tilt relative to the sun.  This means we are half way through a cycle that began in June on the Summer Solstice and will end in December on the Winter Solstice.

Here’s an explanation from Wikipedia:  “In the half year centered on the June solstice, the Sun rises and sets towards the north, which means longer days with shorter nights for the Northern Hemisphere and shorter days with longer nights for the Southern Hemisphere. In the half year centered on the December solstice, the Sun rises and sets towards the south and the durations of day and night are reversed. Also on the day of an equinox, the Sun rises everywhere on Earth (except the Poles) at 06:00 in the morning and sets at 18:00 in the evening (local time).”

What are the marks of autumn for you?  Is it the return to school, the burst of energy, enthusiasm that comes from strapping on the cultural expectations of our youth?  Or, are the leaves changing, the senescence in the plant world a key moment for you?  Perhaps the chill winds and cool nights, the clear night skies.  For some it could be the nearing of deer hunting, or the start up of the NFL and the college football seasons.  Some find the gradual slide into darkness a time of increasing depression, the beginnings of Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Whatever marks this change for you it comes along with the seasonal ones; changes marked by decreasing solar energy per square foot and the attendant cooling.

This is the second of the three harvest festivals in the Celtic calendar, the first happening on August 1st, Lughnasa, and the final harvest festival marking Summer’s End, Samhain, on October 30th.  This was an other occasion for a market fair, settling of debts and entering into contracts.