White dress, red sash, and candles.

[mrissa]

Today on Making Light there's a bit about St. Nicholas and his day. It was interesting to me in an outsider sort of way: we don't do anything for the feast of St. Nicholas here. Our near-Christmas saint-based holiday is coming a week from today with Santa Lucia Day, and I'm hoping to have time to bake the lussekatter in time. There will be no early morning singing, just lovely little saffron buns with dried blueberries (ought to be raisins, but we like dried blueberries). I won't ever wear the candle wreath and the red sash again. This was one of the most definite signs that I was a grown woman, and it was a bittersweet sign.

Sometimes people from other ethnic backgrounds are politely confused: we are the Prottiest Prots that ever you would wish to see. Why on earth are we celebrating a saint day? An Italian saint day, in a pack of Nordic types? But listen: we need it here. We need the fire in the darkness, the maidens of light and the costly golden bread. We can't do without it. This is how we manage January at this latitude: because we've had the songs and the bread and the candles. Because while the air is getting colder, the days are getting longer. Christmas has become a fairly theological light-in-darkness, at a remove, somewhat intellectual if the light-in-darkness theme comes up at all. Lucia Day is visceral for us. Sometimes, yes, in the visceral urge to kill the damned singers because it is five in the morning. But even that kind of visceral urge is alive. It keeps going in the ice and the darkness. I need this Lucia Day. I need this holiday from people who just wouldn't quit, or at least tried their hardest not to. I need this holiday of perseverance.

All the people who are on about not saying, "Happy holidays" because "Christ is the reason for the season" annoy the shit out of me. (She said politely.) Heaven forbid my house should smell of saffron and Mr. Macdonald over at Making Light should get to put his shoes out: we all get one holiday, lest someone else have a happy Hanukkah by mistake, lest someone's Solstice turn out to be joyous.

Well, bah and humbug upon them. Happy holidays. Any of 'em you want. If you're not a proper Christian or not a Christian at all, so what? You can have my holidays anyway. Try a saffron bun. Try a cardamom roll. They're tasty. They make me happy. They keep us going just a little bit longer. Sometimes we need our symbols to be direct and tangible, and I promise: it's okay.

Comments

[rosefox]

Winter joy is chocolate ice cream cones when it's snowing. The snow lands on the ice cream and sticks and then you get to lick it off and taste the extra little bit of sweet chill. It has to be chocolate; you can't see the snow properly on vanilla.

Winter joy is walking along Fifth Avenue in mid-December, just another chick in tall boots and a black coat with her hands stuff into her pockets, watching the hustle and bustle of people scrambling to be the most conspicuous of consumers, looking in store windows, merrily buying nothing at all.

Winter joy is shelling out $20 for the sing-along Messiah and getting all hoarse and giddy; or carolling with friends, laughing and shivering and belting our hearts out and not caring if we crack a note or three; or going to the Christmas Eve service at the local church, leaving when it becomes clear that the chorus isn't up to my standards, and singing "Unto us a child is born" all the way home at the top of my lungs. I'll never be fully committed to Christianity for various reasons, but you can't beat the music.

Winter joy is finding the perfect gift for someone who wasn't expecting one.

Winter joy is calling my mother and saying "It's snoying!" like her mother used to do.

None of it is really about religion, despite the trappings. It's not about gifts, though they're fun to give and get. And it's not about music, though if it were about anything for me it would be music because the music best embodies what it all really is about: sucking icy air into our lungs and giving it back to the world warm and rich with celebration and love and happiness, our different voices and melodies coming together in candy-striped harmony, and each of us taking some of our collective joy to light our way as we head out into the dark towards home.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If giving ice back warm and rich with celebration and love and happiness and collective joy to light our way isn't really about religion, I think I don't have a religion after all.

It may not be about theology, but for me there's a difference.

[rosefox]

I think you're using theology/religion the way I use religion/spirituality. I doubt we disagree very much once translations are made from one idiolect to the other. *)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, and for me it's not Fifth Avenue. For me it's being another woman in a snowflake-patterned sweater in the skyway, pausing among the hurrying crowds above the street to watch the snow fall in the headlights and streetlights, safe and warm closed in the glass.

But the idea is the same.