Holidays for all

[resonant]

The last weeks of December are to time what Jerusalem is to space: they're sacred to almost everybody. The result is that whatever your preferences are, somewhere in the history of human culture there's a holiday to suit them. Unless, of course, your preference is not to have a holiday this time of year at all but just go on with your ordinary life -- that's generally not an option, at least in America.

Me myself, I mostly celebrate Saturnalia. Friends, overindulgence, laziness, material goods. One Saturnalia element I don't have very much of is Misrule, but then Misrule sort of requires both largish groups of people and defined roles to reverse, and neither of those is much part of my life these days. Maybe when the kidlet gets too old for Santa Claus, we'll start having a day of family Misrule, where they get to make all the decisions but also have to do all the chores. One day they will have enough contact with the outside world to realize how deeply odd their family is.

The Feast of the Nativity is a quiet, contemplative sort of observance, and I find it easier to capture the proper attitude during the empty days of January and February than now, when it would have to compete with so much food and music and greetings from distant friends, so much purely human pleasure. Though now that I think of it, part of the meaning of the Incarnation story is that all human things are blessed and sacred -- not just big things like justice and kindness but little things like our pleasure in food and warmth.

I don't have a sense of the spirit of other winter-solstice-related holidays -- Hanukkah, Yule, Sunreturn. I'd like to know more about them, not the history of them but how they feel, what sort of spirit is at the heart of them.

I wish you all warmth and light, and a holiday merry or sacred or quiet or raucous or whatever suits you best.

edited 2020 to retroactively correct the kidlet's gender pronouns

Comments

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

Good wishes your way too. :)

I keep saying I wish they'd move Christmas to February 1st. That's when I need it, not after two solid months of holidays. Dead of winter sounds just about right.

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

Are you familiar with the work of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel? In his book "Sabbath" he writes that when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, the Jewish people recreated that temple in a temporal sense, in our celebration of Shabbat. Shabbat now is our temple; it is in time what the Temple of old was in space, a connection-point with the holy. :-)

Figured you might find that, er, resonant, given the first line of your post.

Will email you this week with a link to some Chanukah writings... :-)

[ecaterin.livejournal.com]

That is most lovely :)

[persephone-il.livejournal.com]

'd like to know more about them, not the history of them but how they feel

This is just a personal thing, but...
Hanuka, to me, is just an overall sense of safe. The warmth of the candle-light, the songs which are mostly happy but minor-key, the sounds of rain outside. Chocolate coins. There's something very domestic about it, very calm.
And, like every other Jewish holliday - "They've tried to kill us, they've failed, let's eat". Even when you're old enough to know that even then it was probably all political and much more complicated than the stories say, there's a little warmth in knowing that your ancestors lived through tough situations and came out victorious.

I am a sap...

[fullygoldy.livejournal.com]

No real idea why, but this post and these few replies before me have made me a little verklempt.

Here I sit, listening to the Charlie Brown gang singing "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," and reading this, and there are little trails of tears on my cheeks.

Ahh. All is right with the world today.

[snailbones.livejournal.com]

Good wishes to you too. Enjoy!

[ecaterin.livejournal.com]

Merry Merry to you, bringer of wonderful music :)

[retrofit88.livejournal.com]

I'm a Unitarian Universalist, so, ya know, I don't quite _own_ any of these here winter light-festival holidays. But that's the key for me, the light-festival part of it. This is the dark time of year, and the lights in the darkness are very hopeful things. Also, reassuringly cyclical.

In a lot of ways I like Hanukkah better than Christmas. It's smaller, lasts longer (and thus gives you more time to think about things) and is more contemplative in general. For me, at least, less wrapped-up in the whole commercial enterprise. I also think that in many ways, the Hanukkah story is more compelling. As Persephone said above, "they tried to kill us, we survived". The Christmas story is great, but if you're not going for the religious significance, it's kind of small-scale. It's about bad times for one little family. Hanukkah is about the survival and persistence and faith in dark times of an entire people. That's what I like about it.