The news is so awful I can’t read it or watch it anymore. Disbelief after disbelief. This is not a happy season! And yet, and yet, when I remember nature and the world – it’s a different story. Today is the day of the Winter Solstice. The most unapologetically pagan holiday we have, next to Christmas, which has its roots in paganism, way before Christianity was born. Christmas stockings? Pagan. And unashamedly sexual – openings by the fire, bun in the oven, and Santa stuffing the stockings with his SAC full of nuts and fruit – all about reproduction (what we knew of it at the time) as it’s the time, so the pagans believed, when the Winter God reunites with the Winter Goddess, ending the cold, hard winter and bringing light and warmth back into the world. Today is the day it begins, the Sun makes its return, and the days begin to get longer.
So the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow‐white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive. — Shortest Day by Susan Cooper
