Happy Solstace
I was going to write up a description of my high school’s weird “Candlelighting” ceremony that was always performed on the last day before winter break as a secular alternative to a Christmas pageant for a school whose students were mostly Jewish. But it seems Tony Sachs did it last year at the Huffington Post:
The ceremony started with the headmaster, who in my day was a bespectacled fellow with a demeanor not unlike that of a younger Ronald Reagan, striding onstage holding a long lit candle. Behind him, the stage was filled with more candles, most of them unlit, mounted on weird geometrically-shaped stands that made the whole thing feel even more like a particularly elegant Satanic mass. “In the season of the sun’s rebirth,” he would solemnly intone, “on the eve of the winter solstice, I consecrate this house … with LIGHT.” Then he’d walk over to one of the unlit candles and light that baby up. The only thing missing was a hooded robe and an altar on which to sacrifice one of the pre-K kids.
If that wasn’t enough, one lucky “pagan” from every grade would march on up, candle in hand, for his or her own little bit of consecration. Starting with the sixth grader, each student would read a line from a poem which was either written by a student decades earlier or by some guy named Ffyglygthl in the 6th century, I’m not sure. “Build your house upon the hill of truth,” it began, and went on to include such doozies as “May the Roof of your Dwelling be Love; the wing of the Archangel; the Great Fire.” [...]
I’m still amazed that, to the best of my knowledge, none of our parents ever complained that the school was trying to turn their children into godless, fire-worshiping heathens. These are people who would threaten lawsuits if their kids were given an A-minus on their chemistry midterms instead of an A. I suppose bowing down to the gods of flame one day a year didn’t adversely affect a Harvard application.
You can read the whole candlelighting poem here. The school started in kindergarten, but I didn’t start going there until ninth grade. Consequently, I was fully aware of how bizarre this was from the get-go. Still, I always thought it was a neat ceremony. And, honestly, there would be a lot to be said for changing things up and holding a big, non-sectarian, gift/tree/family oriented Holiday on December 21 that would be followed on December 25 by a low-key church-oriented celebration for practicing Christians.
57 Responses to “Happy Solstace”
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December 21st, 2008 at 4:16 pm
And, honestly, there would be a lot to be said for changing things up and holding a big, non-sectarian, gift/tree/family oriented Holiday on December 21…
Pretty much describes the 25th for most “Christians” in the eyes of this particular observer.
But, your point is taken. Let’s call it “Yule.” It would also allow cheap Christians like me the opportunity to save money by participating only in the latter.
December 21st, 2008 at 4:17 pm
If I didn’t have have such deep and abiding faith Mr. Y’s honesty, I would swear he made this up.
December 21st, 2008 at 4:23 pm
I’m going with the solstIce spelling.
December 21st, 2008 at 4:25 pm
“Solstice”
December 21st, 2008 at 4:26 pm
December 25 by a low-key church-oriented celebration for practicing Christians.
More most of this country’s history “practicing Christians” were deeply suspicious of Christmas because of its pagan and Catholic associations. The idea that Christmas is a dyed-in-the-wool Christian holiday, like Easter, is a myth. The first War Against Christmas was waged by Puritans in Cromwell’s England, the battles also raged on this side of the Atlantic due to he zeal of the New England Puritans.
December 21st, 2008 at 4:36 pm
“followed on December 25 by a low-key church-oriented celebration for practicing Christians”
Low key? You’ve obviously never been to a Christmas celebration at a Southern mega-church. Those make the Ringling Brothers Circus look low key in comparison. I went to one in Texas that had more live elephants than any circus I’ve seen. I still have no idea what elephants have to do with Christmas.
December 21st, 2008 at 4:47 pm
All the cool kids skipped Candlelighting.
December 21st, 2008 at 4:47 pm
The idea that Christmas is a dyed-in-the-wool Christian holiday, like Easter, is a myth.
Nonsense. The occasional outbreaks of anti-Christmas asceticism seen in in various places at various times in Christendom were the (very rare) exception, not the rule — and were almost invariably resisted by those jonesing to pig out, get shitfaced, and, hopefully, laid.
December 21st, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Happy Solstace
Sometimes I suspect that MY is purposely fucking with us.
December 21st, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Greenwich Village Kwaanza.
December 21st, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Today in our War on Christmas News: half-assed Jewish atheist suggests abolishing Christmas, refers to pagan ceremony that his prep school used to hold.
Admit it, Matt-you are a mole for Fox News.
December 21st, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Let’s take it back to what it used to be, the festival of Sol Invectus, the Invincible Sun. Nearly all cultures have a holiday near the shortest day of the year, just to reassure themselves that this time, the darkness won’t decide to stay forever.
December 21st, 2008 at 6:49 pm
I’m all for a secular holiday, especially if it means getting the time off between the 21st and sometime after New Year as a holiday.
If you want to see bizarre, come to Japan for Christmas sometime. There are lights, santas, snowmen everywhere and every store plays Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’. But there’s no Jesus, not as far as the eye can see. Fine by me, but very different from my youth.
December 21st, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Can’t get past the typo in the headline.
December 21st, 2008 at 7:06 pm
“If you want to see bizarre, come to Japan for Christmas sometime.”
Check it out in Thailand, too. They have the colored lights, but they have those all year round. And they do they fake snow in the windows, which kind of strange for people who have never seen the real stuff. The bars play the pop Christmas songs. And all the prostitutes dress up in red or white dresses and Santa hats. Hardly anyone has ever even heard of Jesus. But they’ll always come up with an excuse to party. Even if it’s someone else’s holiday.
December 21st, 2008 at 7:55 pm
As a Christian, I’m not actually sure we should have Christmas as a national holiday in a spectacularly and flagrantly non-Christian society. We can have another family-oriented, gift-giving, secular holiday if we want sometime around late December. But I’d prefer it not be called “Christmas”. For me, Christmas is an essentially religious day, on which I would like to contemplate the mystery of the Incarnation. There is no reason why that activity should mean anything to non-Christians, so why should it be a holiday for them? The attempt to make Christmas a national, secular holiday relevant to everyone has simply watered down the essential meaning of the day.
Good Friday isn’t a national holiday (unlike in many other countries) so why should Christmas be?
December 21st, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Morocco was truly bizarre as well.
December 21st, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Re: We can have another family-oriented, gift-giving, secular holiday if we want sometime around late December. But I’d prefer it not be called “Christmas”. For me, Christmas is an essentially religious day, on which I would like to contemplate the mystery of the Incarnation.
Russia has something like this due to the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church has stuck with the Julian Calendar so that its Nativity feast is on our Jan 7, and it is kept mainly as a religious day (with some Russian folk customs of course). Meanwhile the country also adopted “Roman Christmas” on our Dec 25 as a secular festivity with the various Western trappings of giftgiving, parties and the like.
December 21st, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Happty solstace
Marry Chrastmus and a huppy niw yuar.
December 21st, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Thankfully, my secular, elitist private school had a properly British headmaster who would read a passage from Christmas in Wales to the entire student body as part of the seasonal festivities. I mean, really, no matter what religion you were, your family was paying all that tuition money, in part, to send their kids to a school that had the proper trappings of an elite, British-style education. I can’t help but think that pseudo-pagan ceremonies would tend to debase the brand.
Good Friday isn’t a national holiday (unlike in many other countries) so why should Christmas be?
I always found it sort of funny that in the United States, the place where money-making is the religion, Wall Street, closes on Good Friday, but that it isn’t a holiday in any other parts of the secular economy.
December 21st, 2008 at 10:17 pm
Winter solstice is one of those SWPL ideas that is supposed to be multiculti but isn’t — December 21st isn’t the Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere and it isn’t much of anything at the equator.
December 21st, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Winter solstice is one of those SWPL ideas that is supposed to be multiculti but isn’t — December 21st isn’t the Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere and it isn’t much of anything at the equator.
Um, the sun is at its annual southern nadir for everybody in this great, big, bad, beautiful world, you stupid fuck.
December 21st, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Down in Australia they’re getting all Christmasy at the summer solstIce. Don’t know how they do it
And Matt, it’s one thing not to know how to spell; it’s another thing to showcase that ignorance in a headline.
December 21st, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Steve, what’s SWPL? The only definitions I’ve found so far are Sedro-Woolley Public Library and South Windsor Public Library.
December 22nd, 2008 at 3:21 am
wow…
“The winter solstice occurs at the instant when the Sun’s position in the sky is at its greatest angular distance on the other side of the equatorial plane from the observers hemisphere. Depending on the shift of the calendar, the event of the winter solstice occurs some time between December 20 and December 23 each year in the northern hemisphere, and between June 20 and June 23 in the southern hemisphere, during either the shortest day or the longest night of the year, which is not to be confused with the darkest day or night or the day with the earliest sunset or latest sunrise.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_solstice
…you big, fat, stupid fuck.
December 22nd, 2008 at 3:29 am
Matt, for god’s sake get Firefox, and if you already use it, stop ignoring the spellchecker. That is absurd.
December 22nd, 2008 at 5:17 am
SWPL = Stuff White People Like
December 22nd, 2008 at 9:12 am
Hey! I’m a pagan and we are neither godless nor fire-worshiping, nor satanic. My family did celebrate the Solstice with a bonfire and lots of candles (and oysters, sausages, and mead). We set out a plate for our departed ancestors and welcomed the sun back.
By the way, the Candle Poem is great.
Wassail!
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:36 am
Christians, Fox News, spelling, etc.
I’m entertained by the fact that the name of the server MY links to is “intranet.dalton.org”. Unfortunately, no dice for “extranet.dalton.org” or “internet.dalton.org”. I guess we’re all part of the Dalton community.
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:45 am
Yeah, this is pretty much what they did in the Soviet Union, only with the emphasis on the New Year; to this day, the Russian tradition is to have a New Year’s tree-and-presents party (essentially secular), and keep Christmas (celebrated later in January, acc. to the Orthodox calendar) more of a church thing.
Personally I support this model, but I can also see Christianist and/or conservative trolls heading over here in their droves to point out that Matt is trying to turn us into the Soviet Union….
December 22nd, 2008 at 3:02 pm
As a Christian, I’m not actually sure we should have Christmas as a national holiday in a spectacularly and flagrantly non-Christian society. We can have another family-oriented, gift-giving, secular holiday if we want sometime around late December. But I’d prefer it not be called “Christmas”. For me, Christmas is an essentially religious day, on which I would like to contemplate the mystery of the Incarnation. There is no reason why that activity should mean anything to non-Christians, so why should it be a holiday for them? The attempt to make Christmas a national, secular holiday relevant to everyone has simply watered down the essential meaning of the day.
I think, for once, Hector’s onto something here. I wouldn’t put it quite the same way as an agnostic, but I do think that we have conflated “Christmas” the secular festival of decorations and gift-giving and “Christmas” the religious celebration of the birth of Jesus in a way that’s bad both for religious believers and secularists alike. Secularists get a holiday that is quasi-religious, leading to a bunch of arguments over nativity scenes in public squares and gratuitous religious expression by public officials (who probably are mainly nonbelievers cynically exploiting the holiday anyway). Believers get a holiday where the message of their deity gets drowned out by a bunch of stuff that Jesus would have been appalled to see, the modern equivalent of money-changers in the temple.
It’s bad for everyone, and separating the two holidays is probably a very good idea. Of course, I’m glad Hector suggested it, because the minute an agnostic says it he or she will be accused of anti-Christian bigotry and waging war on Christmas.
December 22nd, 2008 at 11:19 pm
wow…
Notace that I didn’t write “winter solstice,” but instead noted the apparent position of the sun, contradicting exactly nothing you cited from Wikipedia, you useless piece of shit.
December 22nd, 2008 at 11:39 pm
“Notace that I didn’t write ‘winter solstice,’ but instead noted the apparent position of the sun, contradicting exactly nothing you cited from Wikipedia, you useless piece of shit.”
I’m not buying it. Here’s what you had responded to:
“Winter solstice is one of those SWPL ideas that is supposed to be multiculti but isn’t — December 21st isn’t the Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere and it isn’t much of anything at the equator.”
He wrote “winter solstice” twice and you responded as if you were directly contradicting him:
“Um, the sun is at its annual southern nadir for everybody in this great, big, bad, beautiful world, you stupid fuck.
It’s clear that you thought that “southern nadir” is equivalent to “winder solstice”. Your reply would be a bizarre non sequitor, if not.
Your wording is also suspiciously geostatic, which would explain why you thought there was an equivalence. Not that I think you really are a geocentrist; but it’s possible your casual thought process was unconsciously geocentric and thus asserted that there is necessarily something invariant in the Sun’s apparent motion for the entire Earth, simultaneously.
December 23rd, 2008 at 12:04 am
It’s clear that you thought that “southern nadir” is equivalent to “winder solstice”. Your reply would be a bizarre non sequitor, if not.
It’s clear that you are a dumbfuck of the highest order. Racist Fuckwit Steve Sailor said that Winter Solstice was a bunch of white liberal guilt mumbo jumbo and nobody really cared about it. I noted that it’s an observable astronomical phenomenon (I refrained from citing Druids, Mayans, Zoroastrians, or anyone else who thought/thinks that it’s an interesting event, because I though that was obvious to non-dipshits, and that Mr. Sailor would merely blurt out something about “Teh Mud Peoples”). I phrased it as “southern nadir” because it turns out that it’s Summer Solstice in Down Fromunda, you stupid fucking noodledick Republican.
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:09 am
Thanks, Steve, for clarifying SWPL. It occurred to me as I was going home last night, after I tried Short Wave Pig Latin and Sanctimonious Wimpy Prudish Loquacious.
I appreciate the humor in that Website idea, even tho I hate the implication that fair-skinned people who don’t care for that “stuff” aren’t really white–if they’re not white, what are they?
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:17 am
Mim,
The term “stuff white people like” is MEANT to be deliberately abusive- at least that’s the purpose for which _I_ use it- so pointing out that it is, in fact, viciously abusive isn’t really deterring anyone from using it. That’s the whole point.
Dilan,
Yes. I don’t support separation of church and state as part of some abstract principle, it certainly isn’t right for _every_ country. But I don’t really see any way around it in the United States. We have never been a Christian country in any meaningful sense, certainly not when we were founded by the explicitly anti-Christian Jefferson, who loved to mock the Incarnation and the Trinity. I don’t see why we should be able to pat ourselves on the back at Christmas for being a pious country, when we are obviously a secular and irreligious nation for the other 364 days of the year.
December 23rd, 2008 at 10:54 am
Stuff White People Like:
Rush Limbaugh
Confederate Flags
Council of Conservative Citizens
Dutch Reagan
Billy Graham
Yes. I don’t support separation of church and state as part of some abstract principle,
Well, it is if you believe in religious freedom (like, you know, the First Amendment), a very cool idea on which this often good, certainly not perfect nation was founded.
December 23rd, 2008 at 10:56 am
…which of course means that Xmas, a religious holiday, should absolutely not be a national holiday. Duh.
December 23rd, 2008 at 12:33 pm
I was also guessing that Stuff White People Like might have been coined by a liberal of color as a way of saying, “don’t include me in your kind of liberalism.”
December 23rd, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Ed,
Duh, you think? I believe I said above that the United States was founded on the separation of church and state. It was also founded, of course, on slavery, unfettered capitalism, and the genocide of the Indians, so I believe it can be questioned how noble a pedigree that is.
December 23rd, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Duh, you think?
Right, but just try telling that to jackasses Bill O’Reilly et al. It’s sad, but it needs to pointed out.
December 23rd, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Freedom of religion = a good thing
Genocide of Indians = a bad thing
That wasn’t really all that difficult.
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