Tag: winter holidays

Hallowe’en, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

November 1st, is All Saints’ Day, a long-standing holiday in the Catholic tradition that emerged from the ancient pagan holiday Samhain (pronounced Saw-wain) in the Celtic tradition.  It was a  time to bring the herds back for slaughter or wintering, and to prepare for the coming winter. It was also the time when the veil between this world and the spirit world was thinnest, and ghosts walked the earth.  Finally, this holiday weekend is a time to remember those who came before. on All Saints Day and All Souls’ Day (The Mexican Day of the Dead.

The holiday runs from sundown Friday to sundown Sunday.  In observing the holiday from dusk to dusk to dusk, we are following the customs of our Jewish and Celtic forebears, who not only began their  holidays at dusk rather than dawn but also celebrated their respective new year’s days in the late fall, going into and through the darkness to await the return of the light

On All Souls’ Day we will also observe that most annoying of customs, arbitrarily redefining daylight hours t by setting the clocks back an hour. disrupting our biorythms for the four darkest months.

So celebrate! Dress up. Decorate. Carve a pumpkin. Hand out treats. Visit a cemetery.  Remember a loved one, or more than one. Share a memory.  Plan your funeral. Feed the hungry. Remember that every end is also a beginning, and the light and the new year lie ahead..

Here is a poem for this holiday

The darkness begins

The faces of carved pumpkins

Glow from lighted candles within.

Children ring doorbells, costumed, in search of treats.

Or so it once was,

This holiday is now sanitized for safety

Fear of the coming darkness is banished

Replaced by noisy crowds with sugar highs

And costumes not of ghosts and devils

But TV characters and superheroes.

Without the fear and mystery of darkness

Without the silence to let us hear

The sounds of nature once again.

How can we reclaim our rightful role

As partners, not as overlords

Of the turning earth?

It’s Groundhog Day Again!

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment


This is my annual updated version a holiday variously known as the feast of Saitn Bridget, Imbolc, Oimelc (both Celtic words related to lambing), and Groundhog Day. I mentioned that the first of February was the only holiday devoted to housecleaning in an email to my daughter. Aha, she said that explains the backstory for the movie Groundhog Day. It’s like house cleaning. You clean, it gets dirty, you clean it again, it gets dirty again… A good story line for a movie! At least my repetition, unlike the movie, is only once a year.
Imbolc, Oimelc, or Groundhog Day, they all anticipate spring. It is one of the lesser-known cross-quarter holidays on the Wheel of the Year. In addition to Groundhog Day it survived as the feast of the purification of the virgin (Mary) after the birth of her son 40 days earlier. It is also the day devoted to Saint Bridget or Brigid. Bridget is the Triune Goddess in her maiden phase, converted to a Christian saint. The corn maiden from the previous harvest is brought out in her honor as a virgin once again, ready to encounter the Sun King reborn at Yul in a mating ritual of spring.
The purification part of this holiday was known in pre-feminist times as spring house cleaning. In ancient time among the Celts, Imbolc cleaning consisted of removing the Yule greenery from the home and burning it, cleaning up fields and home, and in Ireland, burning old Bridget wheels and making new ones. By Imbolc, most of us have taken down the tree and put away the decorations from Christmas, but if you haven’t, you can use Imbolc as the excuse for delaying it till now. After Imbolc, you are at risk of being labeled a lazy pagan if you don’t deal of the winter holiday residue.
Imbolc is approaching the end of an indoor time. It’s cold and still pretty dark, but it is the waxing period of light and warmth following the winter solstice. It represents a final stage of wintry inwardness before the crocuses and daffodils invite us to look outward again. Housebound, we must find our spiritual practice within that space. It is the late stage of the hibernating season as we prepare for the cycle of life to begin again.
Spiritual practice has enjoyed something of a resurgence in recent decades. A spiritual practice is anything that is centering, mindful, focusing, and connects you to the sacred in a very inclusive sense. Practicing patience with difficult people is a spiritual practice. Listening attentively is a spiritual practice. Eating mindfully is a spiritual practice. Meditation and prayer are traditional spiritual practices in many religions. But there is also a form of spiritual practice that invests the ordinary activities of daily life with significance in the way carry them out.
The essence of spring housecleaning as spiritual practice blends several Christian and Buddhist ideas. One is humility; no task is too menial that we are above it, as in Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. The second is mindfulness, to be engaged in the moment, to calm the monkey mind, to focus all our attention on the window being washed or the floor being swept. The third is letting go of attachment to possessions as an encumbrance on our spiritual life, passing them on to another use or another user. The spiritual practice of spring housecleaning can incorporate all three.
Housecleaning means two different things. One is the emphasis on clean, as in wash windows, polish furniture, remove cobwebs, paint, scrub floors, clean woodwork, dust the books. That’s both the humble and the mindful part. In the words of one contemporary Buddhist writer, “after enlightenment, the laundry.” The other kind of housecleaning is to declutter, simplify, recycle, let go of possessions no longer needed, like the greens from Yul in the Celtic tradition. That’s the letting go part.
For many years my Lenten practice, for the forty days that begin sometime after Imbolc and stretch to the floating holiday of Easter, was to wash a window every day. Then I moved to a smaller house, which taxed my ingenuity to find forty windows. I included car windows, TV and computer screens, mirrors. Friends helpfully offered their windows, but I did not wish to discourage their own spiritual practice. There is something very satisfying, very symbolic in letting the light of the returning spring shine through a clean window, but it means more when it’s my window.
A friend described a similar cleaning ritual, only she does it all on New Year’s Day. She takes each of her many books down one at a time off the shelf, dusts it (and the shelf), and decides whether it stays or goes. If books are a rich and meaningful part of your life, revisiting these old friends and deciding what role they still may play in your life and which ones should be shared with others is definitely a spiritual practice. This particular ritual embodies both humility (dusting). mindfulness (concentrated attention on the books and the memories and teachings they hold) and letting go (books to be passed on). This year I used my cocooning season, December 26th to February 1st, to declutter bookshelves, which led to one empty bookcase and about 80 book donations, plus a major cleansing of my Kindle.
So, as the daffodils and crocuses pop their leaves through the ground, as the groundhog in Punxatawny ponders his forecast, we can prepare to emerge from the hibernating season by renewing the spaces we inhabit. Like the bluebirds, whose house I have to clean very soon because they refuse to return to a used nest, let us be about the humble tasks of maintaining our habitats. Spring housecleaning only comes once a year!

First Day of Christmas

~ purplesage41 ~ 3 Comments


For many of us it may be the last day of Christmas. But in Colonial times and beyond, Christmas Day itself was a solemn religious holiday, followed by eleven days of parties and celebrations of various kinds. It passes through New Year’s Day and ends at Epiphany, traditionally the date of the visit of the three kings or three magi, depending on your preference. For me, the first day of Christmas is fairly quiet. My family, or most of it, has come and left after much food, gifts, conversation, board games, home repairs by my son-in-law, and general being together.I spend the rest of the aftermath days until the new year reading some of the many books and doing one of the many jigsaw puzzles I always get for Christmas, un-decorating, and walking in the winter wonderland.

Two poems for the after days,, the first from Howard Thurman and second from me.
The Work of Christmas
When the song of angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas beings:
To find the lost
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among the brothers,
To make music in the heart.

Christmas 2024
The Christmas myth is rich and warm
Amidst the bleak of winter.
A baby, humbly born
Yest destined to become
A guide unto the nations.
Shepherds, angels, kings
A star in the East
All come to welcome him.

And so we celebrate—
Family, like Mary, Joseph and Jesus
Community, like shepherds, angels and kings
Gifts given, gifts received
Like modern day Pandoras,
A year ago we opened
A box labeled 2024
It was a hard and fear-filled year.
As we approach its end
We celebrate the gift of hope
That casts out fear and welcomes joy.

Welcome Yule

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment

A popular expression among some Christians is “Jesus is the reason for the season.” Yes, there is a connection, but The season is the reason why the choice was made to celebrate the unknown date of his birth at this particular time of year. Before Jesus, there was Saturnalia, and Diwali, and Hanukkah. The common thread is the holiday that falls this Saturday, December 21st, the winter solstice, known since ancient times as the festival of Yul or Yule. It celebrates the shortest day and the longest night of the year as the northern hemisphere turns away from the sun..
In Celtic and other traditions, the story goes something like this. The Sun God is born at Yul and grows to manhood. His companion through this travel in the Triune Goddess, maiden Bridgid, Mother Danu, and the crone, who has various names. He courts the maiden in spring, and she becomes pregnant with the sun god. At summer solstice the sun is a the peak of his powers and the goddess she is radiant with a child in her womb. The Sun God begins to decline and dies at the winter solstice even as a new sun god is born. The crone is renewed as the maiden, and the cycle begins again. Or at least, that’s ‘the mythical story that underlies the holidays that enable us to reconnect with he rhythms of the turning year.


Here is a solstice poem:
This ancient holiday
Marks ending and beginning


The seed is still beneath the earth
Preparing to emerge from its cocoon
At Imbolc or beyond.
Yule calls us to take rest in darkness
To hibernate, reflect, and be prepared
To bloom once more.
Let us not hasten through
These cold short days
Spring will come soon enough.
There is no spring without winter
To prepare us or rebirth.

All Saints Day

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment

We, the living, are keepers of the memories

of those who came before

We all had parents, teachers, siblings, friends

Who are no longer present

But will live on as long

as we remember them.

We share the memories of good people

Who made a diffeer3nce in our common life

Great men and women whose prophetic voices

Called all back into covenant

With earth and fellow humans

and all living things..

Remembrance is our yearly payment

on the debt we owe

to those who blazed the path

on which we tread.

.

The Season of Hope

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

Advent begins with hope, which continues as we move into a new year. We can choose our attitude. We can be optimistic, expecting that everything will turn out all right in the end. Yes, there is war in Gaza and Ukraine, and drought and famine and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and species extinction and rising sea levels and a crisis of democracy here and around the world. Optimists just shrug and are confident that all will be well in the end. No need to do anything different.

Pessimists reach the same conclusion from the opposite perspective. Nothing I do will make any difference. We are headed into a not so brave new world, one where we can’t believe what we hear and see, because of the failings of our institutions and the advent of artificial intelligence. So, let’s eat, and drink, and be merry, for tomorrow, we die.

In between the extremes of unjustified optimism and defeatist pessimism lies the middle path of hope. But not just passive hope. Theologian Joanna Macy insists hope is worth no more than either pessimism or optimism unless it is active hope. What are you going to do to bring about a different, better outcome in 2024?

Some of our aspirations (also sometimes known as New Year’s resolutions) tend to be personal—like the perennial goals of eating better, watching less TV, getting more exercise, spending more time with friends and family, reading one hundred books. Those are fine goals, but notice that they are input goals, not output goals or results. If your aspiration is weight loss, for example, the experts tell us to focus on controlling your intake of food and your hours of exercise, not losing twenty pounds. You can only control inputs, not outcomes.

Your personal hope is a healthy body, mind and spirit. Active hope means identifying actions that we can take that will make those outcomes more likely.

The same advice applies to our hopes for our world, our nation, our communities. Yet, we need for our society—our communities, our nation, our world—the same identification of desired outcomes and actions we can undertake that make those outcomes more likely. My aspirations for the world are peace, justice, democracy, and sustainability. Those may not be your goals, but whatever hopes you have for the world, nation or community, the same advice applies.

Some of my inputs are personal choices that promote those goals—the way I deal with energy use, eating habits and gardening (organically), work for peaceful solutions to conflict in the family and the neighborhood, respect differences of opinion and seek common ground, and the way I stay informed about how my choices impact those aspirational goals so that I can choose more wisely. But they are not enough. I cannot save the world by recycling or other individual acts. They are necessary but not sufficient, as the mathematicians like to say. 

Perhaps you are familiar with Marge Piercy’s poem:

“Alone, you can fight,

You can refuse, you can

take what revenge you can

but they roll over you.

But two people fighting

back to back can cut through

a mob, snake-dancing file

Can break a cordon, an army can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other

sane, can give support, conviction,

love, massage, hope, sex.

Three people are a delegation,

a committee, a wedge. With four

you can play bridge and start

an organization….

Google the rest of it! Her point is that we are stronger and more effective in groups than as isolated individuals. Shared aspirations for a better future for ourselves and our children require a community. I would add a second point — Don’t go looking for the World Improvement Society. There are many changes that our world needs, and we can’t tackle them all at once. Find an organization that matches one or two of those aspirational goals, one which also matches your skills, experience, and knowledge (or a willingness to acquire them).

For me, the organizational choices were easy, made long ago. One group is focused, the other more general. My faith community shares all those aspirations and encourages us to work toward one or several of them in partnership with our brothers and sisters in faith. Other community organizations like the Rotary Club or a political party may be a better fit for some readers.

While I contribute financially to a wide range of “do-good” organizations at the local, state and national levels, the organization on which I have focused much of my “save the world” time and effort for the past 55 years is the League of Women Voters. The League of Women Voter matches my skills and experience and is primarily focused on democracy. You may be drawn to the Sierra Club, the ACLU, or some other organization that engages in direct action or lobbies for policy decisions that improve the world we live in.

When it comes to saving the world, what part of that agenda speaks to you, where does your particular passion meet your skills? What organized group of people can best help you channel your effort to making the world a better place both for us and future generations? How can you participate in that work?

Now that’s a New Year’s resolution worth making. Check back with me in 12 months and we will see how much progress we have made on our little piece of the action for a better future.

Reflections on the Season

~ purplesage41 ~ 2 Comments

At the behest of my daughters, particularly my oldest daughter, I am downsizing Christmas.  No, I didn’t fire Santa Claus, or his elves, but there will be fewer packages and less shopping this year.  Instead of everyone buying everyone else a present, we did a lottery for gift exchange among the eleven in the next two generations—three daughters, three sons-in-law, four granddaughters, and one grandson-in-law. My extended family of 12 will have seven physically present and five on Zoom, because several of them have to work over the holidays. The tree is smaller and sits on a table.

Downsizing Christmas has been an evolving process over the last few years. It makes me aware of what really matters.  One is reducing wasteful consumption. My daughters have been urging a shift to consumables and experiences.  Two of them are getting tickets to Stomp! Others are getting movie tickets, and gourmet chocolates. And always books, which I regard as a consumable, a few that may be kept and others passed on to libraries or book sales or friends.  A round of visiting the Global Giving website in which I invite each person to choose a project to support. A movie night for all those present (sometimes we can’t agree and have to split up into smaller groups!) A reading of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Baking favorite treats for those present and absent—gluten free cookies for my middle daughter, blueberry scones for my oldest grandchild, neither of whom can be present.

I remember what Christmas was like when I was much younger, with a family of five and an academic career. I used to complain that I couldn’t observe Advent during final exam season, let alone a less frenetic preparation for the holidays. Now I can observe Advent, alone with my cat, playing Christmas music, lighting an advent wreath, attending all-adult social events, and looking forward to a scaled down and less exhausting round of family-centered gifts, games, movies, church services, and food.

Which is better? Neither. Each has been a treasured place  place in my journey from wide-eyed child going into the woods with my mother, brother and sister to cut down a tree, to the 81-yearold grandmother with the four-foot artificial tree, from the delighted five year old with a doll house with real electric lights to an aging widow who makes a list of minor household repairs for two of her tree sons-in-law. But I do wish that I had come earlier to this awareness, urged on by daughters (especially the oldest) to simplify Christmas, to downplay the material side, slow the pace, and be present in the moment for those I love.

May you experience the blessings of this universal season of cold and dark as both a time to look inward and a celebration of the return of the light (pagan), the arrival of the light (Christian), the persistence of the light (Jewish), or whatever other meaning may speak to your heart and soul. I wish each of you a rich, tradition-filled, earth-embracing holiday season.

How Many New Years?

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

 

I persuaded my oldest daughter to get married on December 31st.  My persuasive arguments? Her sister and brother-in-law would be home for the holidays, they could file a joint tax return, and when they celebrated their wedding anniversary, the whole world would celebrate with them. This year they will have their 25th new beginning as a married couple, a new beginning that starts with a holiday.

January 1st is an arbitrary date, marking the end of the Roman Saturnalia that began with the winter solstice.  Chinese New Year is in February.  On the old style calendar New Year’s Day fell in France on what is now April 1st.  Those who failed to switch and continued to celebrate the old date were—you guessed it—April fools. The Jewish New Year is in the fall, and the Celtic new year began with Samhain, which morphed into Hallowe’en.  Both traditions defined their days from dusk to dusk, so it was fitting that they celebrated the expected return of the light in late December  by going into the darkness after the autumnal equinox.

Each of us has other new years as well.  My birthday is June 30th, the last day of the state fiscal year. (It used to be the last day of the federal fiscal year, but Congress had too much trouble getting a budget passed in time, so they moved it up six months.  Now they never get a budget passed in time.)  So a new year in my life begins every July 1st, and as an economist specializing in state and local public finance, I am pleased to know that it coincides with a new fiscal year.

From age 5 to age 75, my life was also guided by the academic calendar as I progressed from kindergarten o college professor.  Our academic contracts took effect August 15th.  One year I held a new year’s eve party for a group of professor friends on August 14th. Back to school is definitely a new beginning each fall for students and teachers alike, leaving behind the failings of the previous year, committing to do better, and building on the learning of the year before.

While we associate New Year’s Day with parades, football games and in the south, collard greens, for many of us it is a chance to start over, a new beginning.  In the Celtic tradition one casts away those experiences, habits, grudges, complaints, that we do not want to carry as baggage into the new year. On the positive side, we can make resolutions.  The advantage of celebrating multiple new years instead of just one is that we have more than one chance to start over. Your diet and exercise plan or commitment to keeping a journal or promise to call your parents every week didn’t last until the end of January?  No problem.  You can begin again on Chinese New Year, the old French New Year, your birthday, the new school year, and/or the Jewish or Celtic New Year.  It’s never too late, or too early, to start over.

A Happy New Year, and many more in 2019.

Winter Holidays

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

Most of you know I am a big fan of holidays.  This year Hanukkah (eight days starting December 3rd) runs alongside Advent (December 2nd to 24th) and tiptoes through Saint Nicholas Day (December 6th). Solstice is the 21st, so have your Yule log ready.  Then Christmas and Kwanzaa (December 26-January 1) and finally Three Kings’ Day (January 6th), rounding out exactly a month of winter holidays.  I usually forgo Hanukkah and Kwanzaa because I don’t know the routine and stick with my Western European heritage represented by Christmas and solstice.  But all of us in the Northern Hemisphere are celebrating the same thing. light. Hope. Warmth.  Snuggling down into our winter cocoons and letting the seeds of renewal germinate inside us. I just can’t wrap my head around celebrating Christmas in Australian and New Zealand!

Every year I struggle with how best to to celebrate these holidays. For years I was teaching at the university up till maybe ten days before Christmas, and I found it  hard to quiet the mind for Advent, or turn the Christmas spirit off to grade exams and then turn it back on.  Now it is much easier to set the work aside.  I do not shop on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.  Each year I try to spend less money on gifts and more time on experiences–music, theater, movies with the grandchildren, listening to Christmas music. (Deck the Halls is my personal song.)  I refuse to consult wish lists, trying instead to listen to who each person is and get them the right book and the right funny socks or T-shirt that rflects what is special about each of them. I try to observe the solstice in ways that are respectful of Mother Earth by generating less waste (reusable cloth gift bags are this year’s addition), turning down the thermostat, and shopping locally from small stores and artisans.

Certain things are slow to change.  Christmas is still family time. When my dear husband of 53 years died just a few weeks before Christmas in 2015, my three daughters took on the task of supplying the traditional gifts–a book, a nightgown, and a jigsaw puzzle.  The jigsaw puzzle is for after the kitchen is cleaned up from four or five days with the eleven people in my immediate family.  But as I get older, I farm more tasks out.  The home is smaller, and so is the tree.  I have been giving Santas from my large collection to daughters and grandchildren. I know the day will come when we gather at my oldest daughter’s house, but I’m not ready yet.

In Hindu tradition, when one’s hair is white and one has seen one’s grandsons, it is time to let go of household responsibilities and material possessions and seek the life of wisdom and the spirit.  I’m not there yet, but I’m moving in that direction, and the gradual evolution of my Christmas holidays is one of the times that invite me to reflect on this stage of the journey.  That’s the start of my passage.  How is yours?