Lughnasa Harvest Moon
The night takes on a different quality as fall approaches. In my study I’m half below ground with windows opening out at waist level, the lawn sweeps toward me. An animal safe in a warm burrow, protected from the storm and cold, or, I would be if there were any storm and cold.
(Giovanni Battista Ciolina – Melancholy Twilight (1899)
The change in light, the lower night time temperatures, the scudding clouds like there were today change the seasonal tone from brightness and beaches and growing things to darker and more forbidding shades. As this shift deepens and the night begins to overtake the day, as happens at Mabon, the Fall Equinox, most of us feel a bit uneasy, perhaps even a good deal.
By late November and well into December this uneasiness has intensified, perhaps that paleolithic fear that the sun would no longer rise at all, or that it would remain in its pale and weakened state, never again to warm us and encourage the plants. So we fight back with bonfires and candles and festivities, lamps and decorations, gifts and food, celebration in spite of the vague menace.
Thus, by some wry twist the darkest and bleakest days of the year have the most joy, the most song, the most brave gestures we know. We will move, around Thanksgiving, into Holimonth, a season stretching from then until Epiphany that features many of the best loved days and nights of the whole year: Hannukah, Christmas, Posada, Winter Solstice, New Years, Deepavali.
Perhaps I would even go so far as to declare a Holiseason beginning on September 29th, the feast of the archangel Michael and lasting from then right through Epiphany. All of October, November and December months of special observance with holidays as peaks lifted up from a plateau of enhanced sensibilities that lasts the entire time. Why not?