'tis a season

Right? It's a season for something. I'm just not sure how we'll be celebrating this year. I hope I'll remember to be jolly no matter what, though.

I'm beginning to teach Pic about Solstice. Every year, I tell her we are celebrating it, but we don't really have any traditions surrounding it. At least, we don't have any traditions solely for Solstice. We do buy a tree and decorate it with lights and ornaments, but that's so linked to Christmas (although not at all to the celebration of Christ's birthday, as far as I can tell). I'm working the lighted tree into our Solstice celebration. I need to do more research on Yule, no?

I have a couple of books on Solstice checked out and a few more coming, but I haven't found the story I want to share with Pic yet. (Really, I haven't found the story that I want to cherish yet.) Perhaps I'll just start by telling her what different people have celebrated at different times. For now, we are focusing on light. I've told her that Winter Solstice is the shortest day of the year (although, as one book so clinically pointed out, every day is twenty-four hours, Solstice is just the day with the least sunlight) and that we celebrate because the light will be slowly returning for longer and longer amounts of time until Summer Solstice. We are celebrating the light and its return. I know this sounds flimsy, but I'm not building on personal tradition, here, I'm needing to come up with this on my own.

Growing up, we celebrated Christmas. A kind of Christmas. Once, at a time I was attending a Catholic church with my sitter's mom, I went to Midnight Mass, but I'm not sure how much of that I understood. I knew, growing up, that Christmas was the mass of Christ, a celebration of his birth (although I was also aware of suggestions that Christ wasn't born in December and that at some point Christianity had done what religions do in that it had superimposed one of it's holidays on that of a religion it was squelching). I never understood how lots of the elements of Christmas as we celebrated it fit in with the birth of Christ. Why a tree? Why lights on houses? Why crazy gift-buying for everyone? Why Santa Claus?

Here's what I remember: My mom would start gift shopping in July (or some other really early date). She'd have a list of gifts, and as she'd wrap gifts, she put a code or symbol on the package to indicate who the gift was for and what it was. Christmas was a time of baking and lots of food. Christmas was a time of tension. I'll not go into that.

It seems, though, that in moving away from what I know, and don't know, about this holiday, I've moved away from any sort of celebration at all. We went a good couple of years without even putting up a tree. Cardo doesn't say much, but I think he'd like if we did more. I'm sure he remembers somewhat...boisterous Christmases, what with having such a large family headed by a strongly Catholic mamma. Since Pic has been a part of our lives, I've more and more wanted traditions such as holiday traditions to celebrate and enjoy. I'm just getting a really slow start.

So, how will you all be celebrating this Solstice/Yule/Christmas/Kwanzaa/Chanukah? I'm sure I'm missing some important holidays here. Are there any other holidays you will be celebrating this month?

-------------------

P.S. December 19th seems to be National Oatmeal Muffin Day. It's also my parents twenty-ninth anniversary, in case you were wondering.