Author Archives: John Cutrone

Dec 21 2014
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Solstice

The Longest Night

Snow Fields

Tonight at 6:03 PM here in Lake Worth, which is Eastern Standard Time, comes the Winter Solstice. But you don’t need a precise moment in time so much as a sense of wonder and a celebratory spirit to mark this longest night. The longest night is accompanied, by definition, by the shortest day.

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their home with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshines blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us––listen!

So goes “The Shortest Day,” a poem by Susan Cooper that is central to the Christmas Revels each year in Boston. Seth and I got to attend one year when we spent Christmas with his family in Maine. It was a matter of pure serendipity that we happened to be at the Revels on the night of the solstice. It was the year of their Scottish Revels theme, and it was an incredibly special way to welcome Yule. Be that as it may, I think my favorite way to welcome the season is the way Seth and I welcome it now, and I don’t know if it’s our own tradition or if anyone else does the same, but here it is: We take what is left from last year’s Christmas tree, which has been quietly resting in a corner of the garden, and with it we build a fire to bring light to this longest night. Our celebration is outdoors in a copper fire bowl in the back yard, but this is Lake Worth, where our nights are generally mild, even this time of year, and even if there is a chill in the air, the fire is there to warm us. In more northern places, a fire with last year’s Christmas tree could be built in the fireplace. It is, to us, a sacred way to mark the passing years and to honor the trees that bring us such joy each Christmas. So much more honorable than tossing the tree at the roadside for the trash pickup.

It is this night that really welcomes in the Christmas season for us. We will sit by our fire with those who will join us and we will pass around something warm to drink, most likely St. Bernardus or Baladin Nora, two wintry spiced ales, or maybe some mulled wine. I think the spice is important, for ginger, cloves and cinnamon light fire within; so outside so inside. In the house, this year’s tree will be illuminated. We bought it just two nights ago at the tree lot at Yamato Road and US-1, from the same people we’ve been buying our tree from for years and years. They remember us, we remember them, we see them once each year and it is part of the ritual.

You can take part, too, even if you don’t have last year’s Christmas tree. Light a fire, or light a candle if you don’t have a place to light a fire, bring some light of your own to this longest night of the year. These are busy days, I know, but I guarantee you a quiet ritual like this will find and occupy a place in your memory for a long time, whereas the rest will fall by the wayside. Tonight also happens to be the Fourth Sunday of Advent, in which we light all four candles in the round of our advent wreath. Three purple candles and one rose: all four candles are lit and that signifies that Christmas, the old welcome guest, is soon to be with us.

And so raise your glass with us if you care to, or speak a quiet prayer softly to the dark and holy night. Light, now, begins its gradual return. Happy Midwinter. Welcome Yule.

 

Image: Snow Fields (Winter in the Berkshires) by Rockwell Kent. Oil on canvas, 1909. [Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.]

 

Dec 16 2014
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Hanukkah

Miracle of the Oil

Piechowski_Women_at_the_stove

I’ll admit it right here and now: I don’t know much about Hanukkah. I know that there are latkes, potato pancakes fried golden brown and served with apple sauce and sour cream and I like those, and I learned just today from a friend that jelly doughnuts are part of the celebration, too, and I am definitely easy to be found whenever there is a good doughnut nearby. And I know the gist of the celebration, revolving around a small flask of oil that kept the lamp of the Temple at Jerusalem burning for eight days and nights, much longer than it ever should have, long enough for a new supply of oil to be attained, and this is the miracle that is commemorated with each Hanukkah celebration, each lighting of the menorah.

Hanukkah is another festival of lights. We see these festivals in cultures across the globe, but it is fitting, I think, that so many occur now, in these darkest nights of the year on the approach to the winter solstice. This year, Hanukkah begins with the setting sun tonight, December 16, and lasts for eight days and nights. It is a movable celebration: Last year it happened to begin just before Thanksgiving, and one year not long ago, perhaps 2005, it coincided with Christmas. Old Aunt Sarah across the street made latkes that year and shared some with Seth and me. It was cold here that December, like it’s been this year, and the chill of the winter nights brought her back to her childhood and the dark nights of Hanukkah frying latkes with her mother in North Carolina, the place from whence Old Aunt Sarah hails. We enjoyed latkes that year because she had set the smoke alarm off a few times in making them, and Seth had gone over to check on her. She only makes latkes in large batches, she told him. It’s the only way she knows.

“Here, have some,” she said. She put a latke on a plate and then, next to it, a dollop of apple sauce. And then she put a whole bunch on a bigger plate. “Take some to your friend.” That’s me. That was on Christmas Eve, and that year our traditional Christmas Eve dinner of many fishes, which is our Southern Italian custom, included also many latkes. It was a pretty good combination.

This year, Hanukkah begins tonight and ends on Christmas Eve. Who knows, we may have latkes with our Christmas Eve dinner again, should Old Aunt Sarah be up to it. We’ll listen for the smoke alarm.

 

Image: Women at the Stove by Wojciech Piechowski. Oil on oak, 1888. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Dec 13 2014
Santa Lucia, The Gift Bearers

The Night Walks with Heavy Steps

SantaLuciaCard

Have you ever spent a summer in Maine? I’ve spent many summers there, whether to be with family or, back when I was in graduate school, for a series of letterpress internships I did there in Portland and at the Shaker Community at Sabbathday Lake in New Gloucester. When it is summer in Maine, the days seem to last forever, with the sun rising early and setting late, well past the bedtime hour for many children.

Of course there must be balance to that, and now, as we approach midwinter, it’s quite a different story in Maine, and darkness falls early at this time of year and lingers long. The shift of darkness and light is even more extreme, though, in a place like Sweden, up near the Arctic Circle. The land of the midnight sun is, at this time of year, spending an awful lot of time cloaked in darkness.

Perhaps it is fitting, then, that the people of Sweden would open their arms and hearts to a saint from Sicily whose feast day comes in with the longest nights of the year. She is Santa Lucia, Saint Lucy, another of our wintertime gift bearers. The gifts she bears are simple but just what is needed about now: hot coffee and warm baked goods, heady with the scent of saffron and ginger. And light. Lucia brings light in the darkness. Of course we “see the light” and Lucia is a patron saint of those with maladies of the eyes, for she herself plucked out her own eyeballs in response to the unwelcome advances of a potential suitor. He loved her eyes, they captivated him. And so she put an end to that right then and there. This was under Roman rule in the fourth century and it wasn’t long after the eyeball incident that Lucia was martyred for her Christian faith. And while she plunged herself into darkness in her act of defiance, Lucia the saint became a light bearer.

And it is the Lucia who carries light with her in the early morning darkness, entering the rooms of the household with lussekatter (saffron buns) and coffee. She is usually the oldest girl in the house, and she is usually dressed in white with a red sash, donning a wreath of illuminated candles upon her head. There are processions throughout Sweden celebrating Santa Lucia, in churches, in schools, in city streets, on national television. The processions can get quite large, with scores of attendants to the Lucia, each bearing a candle, and also a large number of “star boys” donning huge white conical caps. Everyone is dressed in white, and the procession always centers around the Neapolitan melody “Santa Lucia,” but with Swedish lyrics, my favorite part being Natten går tunga fjät, which translates to “The night walks with heavy steps.” Such a beautiful image, and such a beautiful song. You can feel it warming the air, you can feel it bearing light in the darkness.

Image: An early 20th century Swedish Christmas penny postcard designed by Adèle Söderberg (1880-1915).

 

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