Winter Solstice Archives - Laurell K. Hamilton

The least wonderful time of the year

Christmas used to be my favorite holiday of the year, but that was awhile ago. I realized this year that I hate Christmas, the whole Christmas season, but unlike Dr. Seuss’ Grinch I don’t want to take the holiday away from everyone else, I just want free of it myself.

It’s Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year and the reason for all the celebrations near that astrological happening is that our ancestors were afraid that the sun might not return. They were an agricultural people that understood that without the heat of the sun, they were pretty much screwed, so they threw a party to invite the sun back, to wish him back to life and strength so that we could all live another year. It was the rebirth of the sun long before Christianity made it the birth of the son of God. I get throwing a great, big party to keep our spirits up. It’s like whistling in the dark when you hear that scary noise. We celebrate Winter Solstice because in the darkest, coldest part of the year we need to light a few candles against the dark, eat good food, drink strong spirits, visit with friends and family, play games, tell stories, and do all the things that make us feel positive and less afraid of the darkness. If that’s what the holiday was actually about, I could get behind that, even enjoy it, but that’s not what Solstice, Christmas, Yule, Hanukah – pick your holiday – has become.

The Winter Holiday season has become a billion dollar industry. It has become the time when a lot of businesses make the majority of their profit for the year and the only way they can do that is by us buying things from them. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, I am a great fan of capitalism, being a capitalist myself, but the pressure to buy gifts, the perfect gift, and find that perfect gift year after year is a lot of pressure. The message that somehow if you don’t spend enough on your family, especially the children, that you’re bad parents. I love Santa Claus, but for those parents that can’t afford the big gifts, it is an ideal that leaves a lot of small children across the country disappointed on Christmas morning.

And let me just say now, I feel totally cheated by years of Hallmark and Folger’s Coffee commercials, because life is almost never like that, or at least my life wasn’t. These commercials, and others like them, are the romance novels of family life; they set unrealistic expectations that leave most of us feeling like there must be something wrong with us because we aren’t that warm, that loving, that perfect.

Real life is never perfect. It’s not supposed to be. So let me strike a blow for all of us that are struggling this Christmas morning with reality versus what we wanted the day to be. It’s okay that your dinner wasn’t perfect. It’s perfectly human to burn at least one dish, or have that turkey a little dry, or whatever went wrong with the big meal. Take a deep breath, let it out slow, and tell anyone that complains that next year they get to cook the dinner.

Did you not find the perfect present for everyone on your list? Me either. It’s okay, your friends and family love you anyway, and anyone who doesn’t love you because their gift didn’t meet their standards, why do you care? If they only love you for what you buy them, I’m not sure that’s love. Love really doesn’t have a price tag. Do the best you can, and then enjoy the day with your family. It’s about the people, not the things, try to remember that.

Now, if part of the problem is the family, that’s harder. If your family is not a positive in your life, then you do not have to spend the holidays with them. There, I’ve said it, if your family is toxic to you and spends most of the time criticizing and cutting you down, then you don’t have to stay and keep listening to it. If your family is so awful to you, or each other, that the idea of spending it alone sounds better, then do that. There really are those of us who have had points in our lives where spending the holidays alone was less stressful, or even less frightening, than spending it with our birth families. If you are in that place in your life, honor it. It is a privilege for your family to see you, not a right. Privileges have to be earned by good, loving behavior. Please remember, that if you only visit them when they are loving and good to be around, but they’ve never, ever been that, you may never see your family again. Are you okay with this? If so, then rock on, and enjoy your solo and less stress-filled holiday. If you are not okay with it, then ignore all this advice, good luck, and God speed.

This is supposed to be a holy day, regardless of what exactly that holiness means to you, it is still supposed to be a celebration of joy, light, love, and hope. Instead its become an emotional meat grinder for a lot of us. I want to like this holiday again. I want to feel hopeful that life can be like those tear-jerkingly happy commercials for more than a moment at a time. I want to feel a connection to community, family, and faith that’s in all the TV specials, but that seems scarce in real life. I want to really believe this is the most wonderful time of the year instead of the most stressful. I’m not sure how to get back to the wonderful and out of the stressful, but I am going to try. Here’s to next year, hoping it will be better, happier, healthier, less dramatic, less traumatic, safer, gentler, more happy excited than adrenalin pumping excited, productive, loving, hopeful, helpful, and just all together better. Blessed Solstice! Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukah! Merry Yule! Damn it!

New Blog – Happy Winter Solstice from Our Family to Yours

Listening to Christmas carols and the ocean, as I sit outside and write to the glow of holiday lights. The windows are open behind me so the carols on the blue tooth speaker are background noise to the pounding waves. The wind has picked up from the gentle slap of earlier. The sea had sounded almost lazy as we walked along the shore, but now the sound alone makes me know there’d be no swimming off the beach and even a small boat would be a rocky ride tonight. The stars that had been so brilliant earlier are hidden behind a thick cloud cover. It’s a black night beside the sea and even with the glow of the Christmas lights I’m strangely melancholy. I guess it’s the time of year for it, remembering the people that aren’t here for the holiday and never will be again this side of the grave. Missing my mother is a constant, but I wonder what my grandmother would think about our tower by the sea, to my knowledge she never saw the ocean and never wanted to.

I can smell the steaks cooking under Spike’s watchful eye. Genevieve is helping Jon prepare fresh green beans for pan sauté with garlic and a few other spices. It’s nearly eighty degrees outside while Bing Crosby sings about a white Christmas that will never happen here. The ocean pounds, the carols sing, the lights glow, the dogs wonder why I won’t throw the ball while I type, and it’s almost time for dinner with my polyamorous foursome. Life is good, but there will always be those people who aren’t with me at the holidays that make it a strange time of happiness and sorrow.

Trinity, our daughter, will be joining us from college later. This is her first year away and the first time she has to come back for the holidays. It is both wonderful and a little sad, as well. She is off on her own adventure and we’re thrilled, but it’s another big change and all change can translate to loss in our heads and in our hearts if we’re not careful to remember the difference. It’s all good, but it is different.

Genevieve introduced me to the song, ” All I Want for Christmas is a Real Good Tan,” by Kenny Chesney from 2003. It was pretty appropriate for this year, though we all slather ourselves up with sunscreen in an effort to avoid sunburn. The idea of a tropical holiday isn’t new. Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters were singing about it with, “Mele Kalikimaka” the Hawaiian Christmas song in 1950. Ella Fitzgerald crooned, “Christmas Island,” in 1960. When I was a little girl I loved having a white Christmas with lots of snow, but I’m pretty good sitting here with a warm ocean just outside the door and palm trees swaying in the tropical breeze. White sand will do just fine as a stand in for all that snow.

The picture with this blog is from my office for the day where three of the dogs helped inspire me, just like they do at home.

I hope that all of you reading this will have a wonderful holiday celebration whether it is Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Yule, or Winter Solstice, and that family, whether of choice or of blood, gather round you. May you have friends, and if a solitary holiday is what you want I hope you enjoy your own company, because in the end no matter how many people we love, or love us, it is ourselves that we come to in the end and always.

Happy Return of the Sun, remember God/s/Goddess/es Love Us!

It was supposed to be a celebration of the return of the sun, the rebirth of the light, to help us get past the gloom of the longest night of the year, which is Winter Solstice. It was supposed to lift our spirits and reassure us that spring will come again, summer warmth will happen, we are not trapped in the bleak heart of winter to die in the dark.

Yes, all the festivities, all the good cheer, really boils down to that. Human beings have been doing something to celebrate the Winter Solstice. Almost all of the traditions have something to do with worshipping, or trying to persuade, the sun, the light, to return, to be reborn and give us their blessing again, because at some level people seemed to realize without the sun there is no more warmth. Without the sun the crops will not grow, there will be no spring lambs, or calves, or . . . We’ve understood for thousands, upon thousands of years that without the sun we’re pretty much screwed so we plead with it to return. Most of the earliest sun religions were about trying to get the sun to keep coming back and helping us grow food, and raise our spirits once more into the light, and away from the darkness of midwinter.

Originally that’s what this time of year was about, and then came Hanukkah, and Christmas. They are also celebrations of light and love, of survival against tough odds, and the conquering of the light, the son, over the forces that would destroy us all. The Israelites survived yet another attempt to wipe them out as people by the miracle of the never ending oil that burned for eight miraculous days. Jesus survived Herod’s attempts to kill him, and the implication is that if he can make it through, so can we, and that we, too, can have the protection of the Virgin Mary, and her stout right hand St. Joseph, who was a carpenter and you just feel that anyone that’s down to earth enough to work with wood must have a good head on his shoulders. In America I think that Joseph is particularly relevant as we have more and more step-parents and blended family. Think about he was step-dad to the son of God, no pressure there. He must have been a remarkable man to have stood by Mary and Jesus, and then all their other children. I love the idea that Jesus was from a big family with lots of half-brothers and sisters. But then I really like the Gospel of Thomas, which the Church deemed too dangerous to put in the Bible, or perhaps too confusing. I love Thomas, he’s always been my favorite disciple. Doubting Thomas who is invited to put his finger in the wound of the risen Christ, because Thomas doesn’t believe he’s real. There’s a man after my own heart, let me touch it, let me test it – Thomas was a sceptic and a scientist at heart, and I love him for it, because I’d want to touch the evidence to, and if you wouldn’t want to touch the risen Christ, then I can’t explain it to you, I know only that I so would have.

But I digress, but then its me, and I tend to do that. This time of year was supposed to either be a rollicking party to help us brave our way through the winter dark, or high, holy time when we worship Deity and celebrate His, Her, Their return, or try to persuade them to return to us and bless us with their light and warmth. We, as people, have a profound need for this celebration or there wouldn’t be any New Grange, the neolithic tomb mound where the Winter Solstice sun comes into that profound dark and brings hope with it. The clouds cleared away enough for the sun to actually do it’s bright job this year. The pictures were awesome.

If any of you are offended by the fact that Christmas is just one in a long line of holidays this time of year, sorry, but it’s the truth. I think the God, Almighty, and his son, Jesus, are both secure enough to accept that Winter Solstice is an astrological event, and that Yule has been around longer than spring baby Jesus has been moved to be a midwinter baby. The Church needed a holiday to turn people’s ideas from drunken revelry and what the Church saw as debauchery, to something more holy, so Jesus’s birthday was moved. I wonder if any of the Church fathers, or mothers (there really have been some) understood that Jesus was joining a long line of sons, or sun celebrations, to welcome back the sun? If you don’t believe Jesus was a spring baby, that’s okay, but there are lambs to greet him in the manager, and shepherd’s watching over their flocks by night, you don’t sleep outside in winter in that part of the world, but there is something about this cold and dark that makes all of us, even the Church, want to put something here to remind us that life will return, that there will be lambs and warmth, and new babies.

So how did a celebration of light, warmth, and proof that Deity loves us and won’t leave us to die in the dark turn into crushing social obligations, and who can buy the bestest presents?

Well, the Romans gave out gifts during Saturnalia which was a very big celebration during this time of year. Some say it’s the gifts of the Magi that gave us the idea for gifts, because of their Frankincense, Myrrh, and gold gifts to the Baby Jesus, and lets face it, their parents. That does explain how Joseph was able to leave his carpentry behind and live for awhile, those were expensive gifts of the day. Other’s say it was an early Christian Bishop named Nicholas, who helped give rise to Santa Claus, because of his charity to children in his day, and throwing bags of gold down chimneys to land in women’s stockings as dowries, according to one story. But modern ideas of gift giving seem to really come from Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, and Clement Moore’s, A Visit from Saint Nicholas. It’s actually a very late addition to Christmas, all this gift giving, and yet it seems to overwhelm everything here in the States.

We worry about finding the perfect gift. People will put themselves in so much debt for this one season of gift giving that they spend the rest of the year paying it off. People say, don’t get me anything, and sometimes they mean it, or sometimes they keep score more than anyone else. It’s an emotional and familial politics minefield. The guilt if you can’t get your child that super popular present is very real for a lot of families. When did it become a contest to see who can spend the most money? When did gifts equate to how much you love your family? When did this season of buying become the make, or break, for most retail businesses? I’ve been researching and I can’t find enough agreement on any of the above to be certain, but I do know that whatever this holiday is about to you and yours, it’s not supposed to be about who has the most toys, the most stuff. It’s supposed to be about love and fun. Either God loves us, or Jesus loves us, or we’re supposed to be having wonderful raucous parties and orgies for Saturn and “love” lots, or raise a glass to Odin and the Norse and have a huge party with our friends and families, or we just light a fire and help chase away the darkness knowing that Deity really does love and care for the Earth, animals, and people it and will not leave us to die in the cold dark. It’s a fertility festival, a celebration of life, and birth, thrown into the face of the darkest, deadest, part of the year – we’re supposed to celebrate life, whatever that means to each us.

So celebrate life and love today, whether that means being with huge extended family, or family of choice, or just with your spouse/partner, or just you and your pets, or just you. Remember in all this gift giving and forced merry making that you’re supposed to love yourself, too, and sometimes a little time to yourself is the greatest gift of all. So whether you are knee deep in children and the post gift explosion of presents, or you are enjoying that first cup of tea with no one, but yourself enjoy this moment and remember it really isn’t about the gifts, it’s about the love.

Happy Winter Solstice and no, the World Did Not End!

First, Happy non-apocalypse! It is already past dawn in Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Madagascar, and . . . the sun will rise all over the world just as it’s supposed to and we will all go to work or school, or sleep in if we’re off work and school for the holidays. I’m sorry if anyone out there didn’t do their homework, write that critical report, finish that work assignment, or pay those bills believing that the world was really ending so why do all that boring stuff. The world did not end, so you are screwed. *hugs* Better luck next time.

I am now going to quote my favorite bit of dialogue from the television show, “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” – “Before I met you I didn’t need to know the plural of apocalypse.”

Happy Winter Solstice, everyone! The light is reborn today, and the darkness is less. From this day forward the light wins a little bit more each day. That is the message of this time of year, that there is hope and life and warmth, and no matter how dark or cold the night that the light will return and life will continue.

Bright Blessings!