So many dark hours

[mrissa]

It's that time of year again: time for the lussekatter. Time to light the candles and sing the songs and punch the living hell out of that beautiful golden dough; time to inhale the scent of yeast and saffron and hope in darkness.

There's only one problem.

My lussekatter dough didn't rise.

I suppose it was inevitable that this would happen sometime: every serious baker I know has sometime when their bread just went awry, and I haven't really had one. It was probably time. But the problem with investing small acts with joyful symbolic significance is that when your small act of hope falls flat, you're left struggling to wipe the symbolism off, quick, before it gets all over everything in the wrong places.

"We've got so many dark hours," said my mom on the phone this week. She was talking about life in Minnesota in December, waiting for the Solstice to come, waiting for Christmas, for Santa Lucia Day; waiting for anything, really, anything good, as long as it'll relieve the long hours of night. And we have an aunt in Arvada, my grandparents live in Omaha, and my friend's husband got robbed at gunpoint recently, and me, I fell and hit my head on the door jamb trying to sort the laundry. It is easy to spot the dark hours from here, and not all of them are coming at night.

But it's always easy, and lussekatter are not easy, and that's kind of the whole point. If we were languidly waving light and hope out of the darkness, it would be a whole different metaphor. An easy one. A false one. But sometimes the work of kicking the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight isn't the thing, either. Sometimes we have to be patient. Sometimes we have to be calm. And, heavens forfend, sometimes we have to be flexible.

I spent the day running errands, and the vertigo is no fun, and I am tired. I am not running to Byerly's to start lussekatter at 9:45, and therefore there will be no lussekatter first thing in the morning on Santa Lucia Day here at my house. Where there are supposed to be some. Where my tired and slightly wobbly self was perfectly prepared to use the last vestiges of energy to make them. No. There will be quiet, and there will be a perfectly ordinary breakfast, and the hope that I have manufactured for myself this year out of very expensive spices and apparently defective yeast is the hope that sometimes I will know when to redirect my energy. When it is time to have a quiet half-hour with my book instead, and check in on a friend who's hurting from a serious relationship that broke without much warning, and be gentle with myself and the world instead of fierce. I haven't given up on fierceness. But I also haven't given up on balance. Even with the vertigo. You have to walk pretty carefully with the candles on your head. Balance is part of the symbolism of this holiday, too. And this year, it'll do.

Comments

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry.

And not.

Because you're right. Sometimes symbolism is just...a lot of effort. But when you put the effort in, then it does work.

It's my tradition to stay up all night, keeping vigil for the sun, on the winter solstice night. Now there's a group of us, but I was the one who started it, because it was my vision of Yule.

And then there have been years when I haven't been getting enough sleep for several days before the solstice, and I can't sleep late the morning before, and somewhere in the wee hours it gets to the point where sleep dep makes me feel ill. And finally I stop and say, "The point of this ritual was not an endurance test, to see if I could tough it out. This is not the celebration I was trying to have." A couple years, I've slunk off to sleep for an hour or two. But last year, I took hold of my symbolism and turned things inside out. I'd been going outside every hour or so to check on the night and see how the stars had moved. And then I went upstairs and went to sleep for a couple hours, to check on the night dreaming as well as waking.

You have a lamp with frustratingly little oil in it, an infuriatingly short stub of a candle right now. It makes me angry for you. But while it would be lovely to celebrate Santa Lucia's day with profligacy of light, this year you will celebrating it by cherishing and tending the smaller allotment of light you've been given, and that's another kind of holiday of light.

I wish you much quiet beauty for tomorrow.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Speaking of light-in-darkness holidays, there's something in that last paragraph that makes me see think the Chanukah story pertains here. I won't retell the official story here because you probably know it. (If not, I can.) But to rephrase it just a little, sometimes when you have done all that you can, there is only a tiny bit of oil left, no matter how hard you've tried. But sometimes, sometimes, with a lot of work and careful tending, and maybe a little outside help, that bit of oil can be just enough to provide the light you need for just long enough to get you through.

I had a couple of very dark hours yesterday, and got some news this morning that is a candle glimmering, and I really needed this, both the original post and the reminder of this side of Chanukah. Thank you both.