Celebrate Your Light!
By: May McCarthy
At this time of year, many of us choose to use light as an enhancement to our holiday celebrations. We decorate trees, light candles, and shoot off fireworks as part of our festivities. We often take for granted that the lights will go on in our homes, offices, communities, and cars simply because we turned on the switches. Light provides us with the tools that we need to live our lives comfortably, especially in the winter when sunlight is available for fewer hours to those of us in the northern and southern most parts of the world. In Seattle where I live, it gets dark at 4:30pm and doesn’t get light for almost 15 hours later during December.
In the past, when electricity and batteries weren’t available, light was valued more as a source of life. Sunlight served as the main source of light and provided the energy necessary to grow plants that release energy into the living things that digest them. It provided humans and other living things with vitamins and kept them healthy. The return of light was anxiously anticipated each year by peoples located north and south of the equator where sunlight was reduced in winter months.
In pre-historic times, the northern Aboriginal people found winter to be a very difficult time. They couldn’t grow any crops and the tribes had to live off of stored food and whatever animals they could catch. The people were troubled as the life-giving sun sank lower in the sky each noon. They sometimes feared that it would continue to sink and disappear forever. After the passage of the winter solstice, they would have a reason to celebrate. They saw the sun rising and strengthening once more, signifying a re-birth, and regained hope for a bright and warm future.
It’s no wonder that many spiritual traditions created winter celebrations for light as a source of life. The winter solstice, which occurs on December 21st, is a popular celebration that marks the shortest day of the year when the night time hours are at a maximum. Since the Aboriginal people didn’t have sophisticated instruments to detect the solstice, they relied on what they could notice. A few days after the solstice, they noticed a slight elevation in the sun’s path, so celebrations were often timed for about the 25th of December.
