The winter solstice is arguably the most observed holiday around the world. Christmas, Chanukkah, Kwanzaa--only the most familiar festivals celebrated during the second half of the month of December. For paganfolk, the solstice is observed as Yule or Midwinter (or the Norse, "Jul", or the Druid, "Alban Arthuann"...). This is a season that celebrates light above all others, because it is a celebration of the rebirth of light--the first observation that the day is growing longer after six months of increasing dark. For our ancestors who lacked our knowledge of the mechanics of the Earth's movements, one feels as if there must have been an annual sense of relief.
I won't bore you rehashing the themes of the season...the birth of the God (be he Oak King, Jesus Christ, or Mithras) or the return of the Sun (ultimately one and the same, I suppose), but I do have a couple of thoughts.
First, there is a tendency (I actually succumbed to it just above) to view our forbears as though they rediscovered that the "Sun was returning" each year, as if they lived in doubt that summer would ever come again, and celebrated with relief that, for one more year at least, the winter would end. This is of course absurd. The Earth has been rotating and the seasons changing for four or five billion years--since before life began. No sentient being has ever known an Earth without six months of lightening and six months of darkening. The true impetus for the holiday lies, I think in the end to the waiting for the days to get longer...for the light at the end of the tunnel of cabin fever.
Secondly, it interests me that the Sun is almost universally seen as male--that it is the "God" (or at least the Divine Son) who is reborn with the solstice. This is almost a truism. The question is "Why?" We see the Sun, I suppose, as somehow penetrative (as opposed to the "receptive" Moon...how so?). Yet it is also "warming", "nourishing", "life-giving"--all supposedly "feminine" aspects. I guess it's nice to know that those qualities can also be attributed to masculine energies as well.
In case you missed it, my little "prose-poem", "A VISION", above is my own rendering of the Yuletide story (albeit with a somewhat Celtic flavor).
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