Holiday Meaning Making
There are so few opportunities in modern life to call on our sense of tradition and ritual. Weddings, graduations and funerals are the extent of many people’s exposure to the magic a sense of ceremony can instill. For me, the winter solstice and the traditions that stem from the celebration of Yule are another way to pull in that same meaning-making and ceremonial marking of the passage of time I feel so hungry for in the day-to-day.
I’ve never been one to complain about the early winter darkness. The darkness is definitely a big part of what makes even the most extroverted turn inward and get a little more reflective and sentimental. The candles come out and the tea practically steeps itself, and once the candles and the tea are going you may as well grab your journal.
My half of our two-home family includes my 11-year-old daughter, Willa, our two muppety poodles, Opie and Hilma and me– a 41-year-old grown woman who never outgrew her childhood love of and devotion to Christmas. Maybe because of how special the holiday was to me as a child (context– I was a bizarrely reverent child who used to cry about the birth of Jesus while sleeping underneath the Christmas tree) I feel the need to work extra hard to make this time of year magical for my daughter during my half of the week with her.
We eat dinner by candlelight frequently throughout the winter, and at some point in early December our snowman mugs come out of hibernation and we hang cedar garlands from the windows while singing along to Neil Diamond’s White Christmas. We take the hour-long drive to choose a Christmas tree from a cut-your-own tree farm. Willa was one when we first made this drive, and in those days there was an old army truck that would drive customers huddled in the back of the truck over hills that seemed too steep. I remember my reaction to being handed a hand saw as if I had any business being trusted with one without supervision.
There is a photo of us sitting on the cold ground in front of the trees, Willa having decided to take the opportunity to nurse. A friend snapped a photo of a kiss in front of a tree, and this became part of the yearly tradition Willa called “the fake kissing project.”
Dawn and Willa’s Fake Kissing Project
It makes no financial sense whatsoever to keep going back there year after year now that the army truck is gone. The trees that call to us are inevitably trees we feel pity for– scrappy looking Charlie-Brown-Christmas-trees we assume nobody but us would love, and sometimes so pitiful we fall down laughing (causing us to feel even sorrier for our tree and solidifying our choice). We always pick a tree that costs well under the minimum, which ends up being double what we’d pay for a tree three times the size at Home Depot. But the tradition feels sacred to us because of the weight of all the years before and all the years to come, and that sacredness is the thing we’re really after anyway.
By mid-December we’re leaning all the way in, inviting friends over to make salt dough ornaments to add to our collection and decorate Christmas cookies (click here for my grandmother’s recipe). We make the same paperbag snowflakes https://www.lovelyetc.com/how-to-make-paper-bag-snowflakes/ and dehydrate orange slices in the dehydrator to hang from curtain rods and coat hooks.
Our traditions aren’t all this trad-wifey. We also decorate whatever gingerbread house Trader Joe’s is selling that year and open the Trader Joe’s advent calendar every morning. Throughout the winter we drink our rooibos chai (Numi makes the spiciest one we’ve tried) and the same hot cocoa comes out closer toward the solstice. As the mythographer Dr. Martin Shaw says, “we make things holy by the kinds of attention we give them.” The sky is the limit when it comes to what we can make special, sacred, and meaningful.
The winter celebrations were historically a time to celebrate our inner light and the return of the sun, and we love using fire as a nod to our Celtic roots. On the solstice we light a fire in our firepit using the Christmas tree stump from the year before. We solemnly write out how we hope to transform in the new year on slips of paper we drop ceremoniously into the fire one by one. On Christmas Eve we go to a church that gives out candles and sings Silent Night a capella in the dark. I always get choked up without fully understanding why when I watch Willa sing so solemnly, her cheek lit by candlelight. We drive around looking at Christmas lights before we go home and open one present before bed, all of us (dogs included) dressed in our red thermal pajamas.
The thing I love about ritual is that even the simplest things– lighting candles at dinner, using your snowman mugs for tea and a Trader Joe’s advent calendar– can fill our soul’s need for meaning and help balance the mundane with the more sacred element a lot of us are yearning for.
