Years ago, each holiday felt full of magic and delight. The excitement I would feel as each holiday approached made me positively giddy. I would gather my decor from whatever storage space we had at the time and begin the festivities. Skulls littered the house for Halloween, fall leaves and my owl collection for Thanksgiving and for Christmas, let’s just say I should have bought stock in Target. But as grief slowly began to enter the picture things changed. It was slow at first, ebbing away the magic and then it seemed to dry up completely. The pain I felt was so tangible that it made me want to skip all the holidays altogether and wake up on Ash Wednesday. Though this year I sense a bit of relief, I’m afraid I may have lost that euphoric feeling for good.
If I’ve learned anything from being in my forties, is that we don’t get through life unscathed. Much of my glee seemed left over from when life felt easier but then eventually, life started packing my lunch with shit sandwiches and the next thing I knew, I’m giving the Christmas decor at Target a deadly glare. For me, it begins in November. Memories flood in of us once connected to a small local church we deeply loved and the time spent one Christmas in Prague for our last (and final) IVF treatment. My sister passed away over ten years ago just before Thanksgiving and her birthday is in December. The wavering of joy I feel as this season approaches is apparent and perhaps part of the giddiness I once had was an energy to fight back. My enneagram 7-self would strap on jolly like an armored soldier and battle my way with twinkling lights, eggnog, and copious amounts of Hallmark Christmas movies. But this year, even the fight against the pending darkness is ebbing. Maybe I’m just depressed or it’s perimenopause. Or perhaps, it’s something deeper. A calling to the darkness that isn’t about dread or sadness, but a calling to winter.
Being a part of the Wild Church movement is changing me in more ways than just how or where I connect with God. It is helping me connect with the earth, the seasons, and our more-than-human friends. I have never considered the solstices or the equinoxes in the wheel of the year. Over the past decade, I have familiarized myself with the church calendar (which is also a wheel btw) but is quite divorced from the wheel of the year and the physical seasons we experience with every one of our human senses. I’m realizing much of my spiritual practices up to this point have been disembodied which I find counter to the Christ story, of a God who literally became embodied. Yet all our rituals are seemingly disconnected from the body and certainly from God’s first body, the Earth.
With the approaching cringiness of an overly cheerful holiday, I feel the need to go underground, not out of depression or hiding, but to participate with creation in a season of rest and hibernation and learn of the gifts darkness has to offer. As God willingly entered into the Earth, spending nine months in the darkness of Mary’s womb, I desire to do the same by seeing this holiday season through the eyes of the Winter Solstice tradition. A tradition not celebrated here in the States but has informed much of how we celebrate, from the Christmas tree to hanging Mistletoe. As I have begun learning about the tradition of Winter Solstice, some of that long-lost magic is returning but not in the form of shopping or running up our electrical bill exponentially, but through admiring the beauty of our Holly Tree on a chilly morning covered in a blanket of frost. I don’t feel trapped in my home as I once did but am resting in the warm womb that only wants to offer me life. The darkness now isn’t a reminder of pain and my still present grief but an invitation to winter deep into the earth, to rest and wait for the Light to be reborn in me, and on the Earth. This invitation doesn’t necessarily make this season less difficult, wintering is hard work. It’s painful to slow down and wait when the rest of the world wants to keep the high energy of summer alive. But as I stare out my window at the bare trees and watch the temperature continue to drop, it’s clear to me that winter has come. It’s time to rest, wait, and learn the slow grace of the darkness.
Coming up this December: A Four-Park Series for Winter Solstice
Winter Solstice is on December 21st this year, marking the darkest day of the year and the birth of the returning light, as each day after will begin to grow! Beginning the first Sunday in December, look for a Winter Solstice-themed essay in your inbox.
12/3 - Pagan goddesses, yule logs, and Christianity, oh my! A bit of history…
12/10 - Spiritual practices for wintering + Special essay for paid members on how to celebrate the Winter Solstice on December 21st.
12/ 17 - Delighting in the Evergreens - What stays true for you all year long?
12/24 - The Light is born - What waiting for Light can teach us
Thank you for this. Looking forward to the next solstice writings!
Looking forward to reading the coming weeks' posts! I switched over to celebrating the seasonal holidays after I moved out west because I wanted to celebrate dates that were connected to actual and present happenings. It is harder to do, as the commercial world around me doesn't remind me when the earth is where on its orbit, but I find it more rewarding for that intention. Specific to your musings on hibernation vibes, I am right there with you, and a friend of mine has a great painting that captures it. You can check out her work here: https://www.soilandstars.art/secretartpage