Since ancient times man has celebrated the winter solstice with pageants of light and hope. Yule is the shortest night of the year, but it is also the night that the days start growing incrementally longer. In the days before TV, the Internet, and even widespread literacy, folks paid close attention to the natural world and they realized that sometime in late December the days stopped getting shorter.
Those ancient festivals were times for people to come together and to light burning wheels and candles and to pray for the Sun God to return from his winter home and start bringing more light back to the world. As I sit here in my quiet house looking out at the Christmas lights twinkling on my block, I’m struck by the face that deep down maybe we haven’t evolved as much as we think we have for every winter, humans feel the need to light the night with twinkling lights subconsciously evoking forgotten memories that are stored in our human DNA.
There is something magickal about single points of lights flicking hopefully in the darkened sky. A feeling of hope, a sense that the wheel of the year will turn again and we will travel back into the lighter half of the year. Living in Northern Illinois, every light that twinkles is reflected back 1000 times by the snow which seems lit by the light of a thousand diamonds.
Zoo Lights is the annual festival of lights held at Lincoln Park Zoo and we’ve gone the last few years and have reveled in the sacredness that seems to envelope the zoo at night. The paths are lit by light sculptures in fantastic shapes and the sounds of carols fill the air. Somehow, I always feel close to my dad when I’m enjoying zoo lights as he loved Christmas and he loved our trips to the zoo.
We celebrate Yule every year to welcome back the sun and to give thanks for the gifts that the sun has given us. The ritual is a simple one meant for children and in fact we started it years ago when the children were small, but we continue it even today reading through the words that have become ingrained in our memory. As part of the ritual, we each eat a piece of fruit as a tangible symbol of the sun’s power and somehow that simple piece of fruit seems special. At the end of the ritual, we play The Beatles “Here Comes the Sun” and dance while holding our candles aloft. Even though I know that there are still long cold days ahead, somehow they seem a little more blissful when I’m holding a candle aloft and dancing to welcome back the sun.
Cairn by Cairn 