Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
This month, we observe one of our two most ancient holidays, observances that go back to before the dawn of recorded time. No, not Christmas or New Year's Eve. The two ancient holidays I refer to are the winter solstice and the summer solstice. In terms of days, they represent the long and short of it.
The summer solstice (the year's longest day) doesn't rate much attention in our country, but in other places, it is a big event. I still remember young Danes singing and cheering the day as they drove around Copenhagen in open, flower-bedecked trucks. At England's Stonehenge, the observance can be a bit far out at times but also expresses joy at the height of summer.
The winter solstice, which occurs this year on Dec. 22, was always the fearful one. I can imagine our prehistoric ancestors being haunted by it as the daylight kept fading and they had no idea why it was fading or whether it would come back. The discovery of fire helped to assuage their fears, as they were able to light up the long darkness and, in the case of the ancient Druids, evolve ceremonials centered around the conflagrations.
Even though today science enables us to know all about the long and short of it, surveys tell us that chronic depression affects us the most at this time of year. Poet Dylan Thomas advised us to "rage, rage against the dying of the light" and, in his own way, he did. Humankind, however, is always resilient, so this season has become a festive, gift-exchanging ritual designed originally to fend off the darkness and cold.
Prehistory eventually became history, and with the spread of religion, the year-end observance was cast in a religious mold. That was not the end of its evolution, however, as business and commerce saw an opportunity there, too. For more than a century now, they have pushed that opportunity to its utmost and then some. So today we are warned of rampant commercialism, even as we are wallowing in it, and told to lend a more spiritual significance to the ending of the year. That battle continues to rage.
Still, amid the din of TV sound and fury and the never-ending blandishments of modern marketing, I like to stop and think about the time when caves and bonfires were as luxurious as it got.
They were, no doubt, brutish, those ancestors of ours, fierce and unfeeling most of the time. Yet, they somehow found the will to rage, prevail and finally catch a glimpse of whatever hope there was in those times as the light began to edge its way back.
Barring a collision with an asteroid or a new cycle of nuclear bombs, we know the light will return. They didn't and that's why, just for a moment or two as December draws to a close, I like to think of them and what they passed on to us.
- James Pettican, a retired journalist, lives in Palm Harbor.