The Winter Solstice Once Again

SUBHEAD: In Hawaii it does not mean the same thing as in upstate New York. But it still means much.

By Juan Wilson on 20 December 2019 for Island Breath -
(https://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-winter-solstice-once-again.html)


Image above: Image of a Winter Solstice on today's Navajo-Hopi Observer. From (https://www.nhonews.com/news/2017/dec/26/guest-column-welcoming-winter-solstice/).

Below are two articles from our website "The Gobbler" from the Winter of 1995 in western upstate New York. At this time of year you go to work in the morning in the dark and come home in the afternoon in the dark. Colder than in the inside of your refrigerator - and often colder than the inside of your freezer.

Tonight we are going to have

 
Christmas Traditions
by Linda Pascatore
©1995 The Gobbler: Winter Crystal

Nativity scenes, Santa Claus, reindeer, stars, wreaths and holly, stockings and presents are all associated with Christmas. Some traditions are directly related to the Christian holiday, while others had their origin earlier in various midwinter or solstice celebrations.  

Christmas, or Christ's mass, is the feast day celebrating the birth of Jesus two thousand years ago. Since the exact date of Christ's birth was not known, the earliest Christians didn't celebrate it. But in 350 AD, the Pope set a date--December 25th. 

It was probably observed at this time because of strong traditions of solstice celebrations. Winter solstice is the shortest day, and the longest night of the year. It falls around December 21st. The earth, in traveling around the sun, is tilted on its axis. At the Autumnal Equinox, around September 23rd, the North Pole begins tilting away from the sun. The days become shorter, the noon sun is lower in the sky, and we get less sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere. 

Solstice means a standing still, because the sun appears at the same low point for a few days around midwinter. From that time on, the days become longer, the light grows, and the coming of Spring has begun. People feared the cold dark winter. It was natural to celebrate the return of the sun and hope for the new year. There were many festivals around this time. 

In most cultures, this was the new year, when the Sun returned, a time of light and hope. Since Christ was the "light of the world", and the hope for salvation and new spiritual life, the tone of the solstice festivals was appropriate for his birthday. The "Sun" god was replaced by the "Son" of God.  

Long before Christ was born, the Persians celebrated the "Birthday of the Unconquered Sun" on December 25th. They lit fires in honor of Mithra, the god of light. This date marked the beginning of their New Year.  

The Jews had Hanukkah, the Feast of Lights, in December. The purpose was to commemorate an ancient victory, in which they drove off an invading army and then rededicated their temple. Legend has it that they had only enough lamp oil for the Eternal Lamp in the temple to burn for one day, but the light miraculously burned for eight days. The Menorah symbolizes this event. One more candle is lit each day of Hanukkah, along with the servant candle or shamash, until all eight are burning on the last day. 

Many of our Christmas traditions are found in the ancient Roman celebration of Saturnalia, honoring Saturn, the god of agriculture. The Romans wore masks, danced in the streets, had feasts, and gave gifts. They placed evergreen branches in their homes at this time, and crowned Saturn with wreaths of holly. Trees were decorated and lit with candles. A figure of Saturn was placed on top of the tree. No war or disputes of any kind were allowed during the Saturnalia Festival, making peace and goodwill part of this ancient Roman holiday. 

For Christians, the birth of Jesus is the center of the most meaningful traditions. Nativity scenes, with Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the attendant angels, shepherds, wise men and animals are found around the world. People usually render the figures in their own image, so features will vary from Middle Eastern to Hispanic, Nordic, Oriental or African. Saint Francis of Assisi introduced the living Nativity Scene. He set up a manger in a cave and had real animals and people play the parts. 

This tradition continues in many places today, with whole villages taking part in the Christmas pageants. In Mexico, people dress as Mary and Joseph, and visit one house each night for nine nights, reenacting the holy family's search for shelter. They are turned away the first eight nights, then on the last night, Christmas Eve, they are finally given shelter and the birth of Jesus is celebrated by all.  

The star on top of the Christmas tree represents the bright star of Bethlehem which led the three wise men to the infant Jesus. Astronomers have tried to find an explanation for this famous star. There were no bright novas, or new stars, in the years around the birth of Christ. 

No comet was visible then, either. However, it is possible that Christ was actually born in the spring of 6 B.C., when there was a close alignment of three stars in Pices; Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn 

This particular alignment had great significance in Jewish history. The same constellation had appeared together in Pices shortly before Moses was born. The wise men of the East, learned in astronomy, might have taken the appearance of these stars as a sign of some great event about to take place in Israel, and so begun their journey there. 

In the Bible, Jesus is called "the bright and morning star." Today, in many parts of Europe and the Middle East, Christmas festivities begin with the appearance of the first star on Christmas Eve. 

The three kings, or wise men, are the center of many Christmas traditions. They were probably magi, learned priests from ancient Persia. Some eastern orthodox sects celebrate Christmas on the feast of the Three Kings or the Epiphany, January 6th. The word Epiphany means manifestation, and according to church doctrine, on that day it was manifested to the wise men that the baby was sent by God. 

The days between Christmas and January 6th are called the twelve holy days, with the Epiphany being the Twelfth Night. The gifts of the Magi foretold the destiny of the Christ child; the would be a king, the frankincense that he would be a high priest, and the myrrh that he would be a healer and martyr. 

In Germany and Austria, boys go in groups of four on the Epiphany, one carrying a star and the other three dressed as kings. In Spain, children go out to the gates of the city with cake for the kings, figs for the servants, and hay for the camels; looking for the kings silhouetted on the horizon. In many countries children receive their gifts on January 6th, either from the Three Kings or from their youngest camel. 

Two other gift givers, the Italian La Befana and the Russian Baboushka, are tied up in the legend of the Wise Men. As the story is told, La Befana refused to accompany the Magi to Bethlehem, and Babouska misdirected the visitors. Since then, both women wander on the feast of the Kings, leaving gifts for all children as they search for the Christ child. 

Santa Claus is a beloved symbol of Christmas to children of many cultures, especially northern Europeans and Americans. He was not always the jolly old elf of today. His first ancestor was probably the god Odin, from Scandinavia thousands of years before Christ. 

Legend has it that at midwinter, or solstice, Odin would ride an eight-footed horse through the world, bringing rewards or punishments to men. Odin's son Thor wore red and fought the gods of ice and snow at midwinter, conquering the cold and allowing the return of the sun. 

Saint Nicholas is the Christian predecessor to Santa. He was a kind-hearted bishop in Asia Minor in the 4th century. Legend has it that a poor nobleman had three daughters and no dowry for them. When the time came for the first daughter to marry, a bag of gold appeared overnight in his home. 

The same thing happened with the second daughter. When it was time for the third daughter to marry, her father kept watch and caught Bishop Nicholas dropping a bag of gold down the chimney, where it landed in a stocking hung over the fire to dry.  

News of the bishop's good deeds got out. and soon the stories grew into legendary proportions. The anniversary of his death was December 6th, and soon the legend merged with Christmas. 

In Holland, St. Nicholas or Sinterklaas, would come on a horse. Children would leave their shoes filled with hay for his horse, and he would leave them nuts and candies. In Lapland, the saint drove a reindeer sleigh. 

The Swedes wait for a gnome, Jultomten, with the goats of the god Thor pulling the sleigh. In Germany and Holland the influence of Odin remained, and Saint Nick carried a switch to dole out punishment for bad children as well as rewards for good ones. 

Americans created a kinder, gentler Santa. In 1809 Washington Irving wrote of a chubby man with a big smile. The most popular image of Santa Claus was in Dr. Clement Moore's "The Night Before Christmas." This poem contains all the modern elements--the flying reindeer pulling the sleigh, entry through the chimney, stockings hanging by the fireplace, a large sack of toys, and a fat, jolly Saint Nick. 

Certain common themes run through all the Christmas traditions, from the solstice festivals, to the pagan gods, to the Christian commemoration of the birth of Jesus. They all celebrate the return of light and hope to the world. The sentiments of the season are peace and goodwill, love and the spirit of giving.

Source:

Image above: Holly, Reindeer, and Colored Lights; The Story of the Christmas Symbols; by Edna Barth, Seabury Press, New York, 1971. 

The Seasons of the Senecas

© 1995 The Gobbler: Winter Thaw

by Linda Pascatore






Method of tapping trees, Grand River Reserve 

The local Seneca Indians here in Western New York had traditional celebrations for each season. They lived in close harmony with nature and the flow of the seasons. They were dependent on the natural environment to provide them with the basic necessities of their lives; food, clothing and shelter.

Their spirituality was also centered in nature. They called the earth Mother, the sky Father, the moon Grandmother, the sun Grandfather, and animals, trees and plants their brothers and sisters. It was natural for them to celebrate the changing seasons.

The Senecas were part of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois divided the year into four seasons which coincide with ours. Their new year was probably originally in the Spring, but after contact with Europeans they began to celebrate it around the time of the Winter Solstice as we do today. The names of the seasons, obtained from Chief David Key (Seneca speaking Onondaga) are;


Winter: gu sa' a gi, "the cold has arrived"

Spring: diyugwagaho' di, "it is time to plant or sow"

Summer: gana na' gi, "it red has come"

(a reference to red strawberries?)

Fall: ganana' ge hagwadi, "the red colours have come"

 
The local Native Americans found the twelve moons of the year more meaningful than our rather arbitrary system of months, which attempts to fit lunar months into a solar calendar (see our Gobbler version of a Solar/Moon calendar). The Iroquois named months after weather conditions or foods produced at that particular time of year. The names that follow begin with the first moon after the New Year. They were provided by John Gibson, historic chief of the Brant Reservation (near Silver Creek);


disgu' na: "principal mid-winter moon"

gana du' ha: "leaves falling into the water from such trees as the oak and beech, to which they have clung during the winter" 

gana du gu' na: "great falling of leaves under the water now" 

he sata: "bushes, shrubs, and plants begin to grow again" 

u hiaigu' na: "berries begin to ripen"

sisge' ha: "plants growing"

sisgegu' na: "almost everything growing up and bearing something"

gade' a: "food beginning to form"

gade a gu' na: "season when everything is bearing food"

dijutu' weha: "beginning of cold weather"

djutuwegu' na: "again it is cold greatly"

disa: "the sun is returning" (reference to lengthening days after the Winter Solstice)

The Iroquois celebrated eight major festivals each year. They often coincided with the seasonal availability of foods that were staples for area tribes. The dates varied with local conditions across the Iroquois territory. They were;


New Year

Tapping the Maple Trees

Maple Sugar Festival

Planting the Corn

Strawberry Festival

Bean Festival

Green Corn Festival

Gathering the Corn. 

 
At this time of year in early spring in the northeast, the native Americans would have been tapping the maple trees, as is still done today. Maple syrup is a local resource and true native food. The Iroquois used bark funnels as taps and wooden troughs carved from a tree trunk to hold the sap (see illustration). It was boiled down to make syrup and used in cooking. At the end of the maple syrup season, the Maple Sugar Festival was held.

The Iroquois festivals usually included ceremony, singing, dancing, and feasting. At this particular celebration, the soups were flavored with the new maple syrup. Making maple sugar seems a natural excuse for a party at the end of a dreary winter.

A modern Maple Sugar Festival at the Methodist Church in Mayville. We listened to the children of the parish sing while stirring hot maple syrup in anticipation of the sweet sugar crystallizing. Maybe some traditions are so ingrained in time and place that they cross the lines of culture to become common, shared human experiences.

Editor's Note: There is little written on the details of these seasonal events. The Native Americans used oral traditions; myths, legends and stories. Through the years, many of these ceremonies were incorporated into the Long House religion, which is a mixture of traditional native beliefs and Christianity. 

Currently, the Long House ceremonies are not shared with non-native outsiders. If there are Senecas, Iroquois or other natives in the area who would like to write something for us or just tell us some stories, please E mail us. I did find some valuable resources at Barbara Berry's Book Shop, on Route 394 and Stedman Road, in Stedman, New York. 

Warren Berry has an entire series of books which are reprints of historical writings on many aspects of Iroquois life. The sources used for this article are Myths of the Iroquois by E.A. Smith and Iroquois Foods and Food Preparation by F.W. Waugh; published by Iroqrafts, Ltd.; Ontario, Canada.

http://islandbreath.org/TheGobbler/Articles%20Published/Seasonal%20SZ/07%20Crystal/sz_iroquois_winter.html

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A Season of Consequences

SUBHEAD: Wishing to all a rekindling of light, hope, and sanity in a dark and troubled time.

By John Michael Greer on 21 December 2016 for the Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/12/a-season-of-consequences.html)


Image above: Photo of crwod at celebration of Alban Arthuan (Winter Solstice) at Stonehenge. From (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-wiltshire-35158234).

One of the many advantages of being a Druid is that you get to open your holiday presents four days early.

The winter solstice—Alban Arthuan, to use one term for it in the old-fashioned Druid Revival traditions I practice—is one of the four main holy days of the Druid year. Though the actual moment of solstice wobbles across a narrow wedge of the calendar, the celebration traditionally takes place on December 21.

Yes, Druids give each other presents, hang up decorations, and enjoy as sumptuous a meal as resources permit, to celebrate the rekindling of light and hope in the season of darkness.

Come to think of it, I’m far from sure why more people who don’t practice the Christian faith still celebrate Christmas, rather than the solstice.

It’s by no means necessary to believe in the Druid gods and goddesses to find the solstice relevant; a simple faith in orbital inclination is sufficient reason for the season, after all—and since a good many Christians in America these days are less than happy about what’s been done to their holy day, it seems to me that it would be polite to leave Christmas to them, have our celebrations four days earlier, and cover their shifts at work on December 25th in exchange for their covering ours on the 21st.

Back before my writing career got going, when I worked in nursing homes to pay the bills, my Christian coworkers and I did this as a matter of course; we also swapped shifts around Easter and the spring equinox. Religious pluralism has its benefits.

Those of my readers who don’t happen to be Druids, but who are tempted by the prospect just sketched out, will want to be aware of a couple of details.

For one thing, you won’t catch Druids killing a tree in order to stick it in their living room for a few weeks as a portable ornament stand and fire hazard.

Druids think there should be more trees in the world, not fewer! A live tree or, if you must, an artificial one, would be a workable option, but a lot of Druids simply skip the tree altogether and hang ornaments on the mantel, or what have you.

Oh, and most of us don’t do Santa Claus. I’m not sure why Santa Claus is popular among Christians, for that matter, or among anyone else who isn’t a devout believer in the ersatz religion of Consumerism—which admittedly has no shortage of devotees just now.

There was a time when Santa hadn’t yet been turned into a poorly paid marketing consultant to the toy industry; go back several centuries, and he was the Christian figure of St. Nicholas; and before then he may have been something considerably stranger.

To those who know their way around the traditions of Siberian shamanism, certainly, the conjunction of flying reindeer and an outfit colored like the famous and perilous hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria is at least suggestive.

Still, whether he takes the form of salesman, saint, or magic mushroom, Druids tend to give the guy in the red outfit a pass. Solstice symbolism varies from one tradition of Druidry to another—like almost everything else among Druids—but in the end of the tradition I practice, each of the Alban Gates (the solstices and equinoxes) has its own sacred animal, and the animal that corresponds to Alban Arthuan is the bear.

If by some bizarre concatenation of circumstances Druidry ever became a large enough faith in America to attract the attention of the crazed marketing minions of consumerdom, you’d doubtless see Hallmark solstice cards for sale with sappy looking cartoon bears on them, bear-themed decorations in windows, bear ornaments to hang from the mantel, and the like.

While I could do without the sappy looking cartoons, I definitely see the point of bears as an emblem of the winter solstice, because there’s something about them that too often gets left out of the symbolism of Christmas and the like—though it used to be there, and relatively important, too.

Bears are cute, no question; they’re warm and furry and cuddlesome, too; but they’re also, ahem, carnivores, and every so often, when people get sufficiently stupid in the vicinity of bears, the bears kill and eat them.

That is to say, bears remind us that actions have consequences.

I’m old enough that I still remember the days when the folk mythology surrounding Santa Claus had not quite shed the last traces of a similar reminder. According to the accounts of Santa I learned as a child, naughty little children ran a serious risk of waking up Christmas morning to find no presents at all, and a sorry little lump of coal in their stockings in place of the goodies they expected.

I don’t recall any of my playmates having that happen to them, and it never happened to me—though I arguably deserved it rather more than once—but every child I knew took it seriously, and tried to moderate their misbehavior at least a little during the period after Thanksgiving.

That detail of the legend may still survive here and there, for all I know, but you wouldn’t know it from the way the big guy in red is retailed by the media these days.

For that matter, the version I learned was a pale shadow of a far more unnerving original. In many parts of Europe, when St. Nicholas does the rounds, he’s accompanied by a frightening figure with various names and forms.

In parts of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, it’s Krampus—a hairy devil with goat’s horns and a long lolling tongue, who prances around with a birch switch in his hand and a wicker basket on his back.

While the saint hands out presents to good children, Krampus is there for the benefit of the others; small-time junior malefactors can expect a thrashing with the birch switch, while the legend has it that the shrieking, spoiled little horrors at the far end of the naughty-child spectrum get popped into the wicker basket and taken away, and nobody ever hears from them again.

Yes, I know, that sort of thing’s unthinkable in today’s America, and I have no idea whether anyone still takes it with any degree of seriousness over in Europe. Those of my readers who find the entire concept intolerable, though, may want to stop for a moment and think about the context in which that bit of folk tradition emerged.

Before fossil fuels gave the world’s industrial nations the temporary spate of abundance that they now enjoy, the coming of winter in the northern temperate zone was a serious matter.

The other three seasons had to be full of hard work and careful husbandry, if you were going to have any particular likelihood of seeing spring before you starved or froze to death.

By the time the solstice came around, you had a tolerably good idea just how tight things were going to be by the time spring arrived and the first wild edibles showed up to pad out the larder a bit.

The first pale gleam of dawn after the long solstice night was a welcome reminder that spring was indeed on its way, and so you took whatever stored food you could spare, if you could spare any at all, and turned it into a high-calorie, high-nutrient feast, to provide warm memories and a little additional nourishment for the bleak months immediately ahead.

In those days, remember, children who refused to carry their share of the household economy might indeed expect to be taken away and never be heard from again, though the taking away would normally be done by some combination of hunger, cold, and sickness, rather than a horned and hairy devil with a lolling tongue. Of course a great many children died anyway.

A failed harvest, a longer than usual winter, an epidemic, or the ordinary hazards of life in a nonindustrial society quite regularly put a burst of small graves in the nearest churchyard. It was nonetheless true that good children, meaning here those who paid attention, learned fast, worked hard, and did their best to help keep the household running smoothly, really did have a better shot at survival.

One of the most destructive consequences of the age of temporary abundance that fossil fuels gave to the world’s industrial nations, in turn, is the widespread conviction that consequences don’t matter—that it’s unreasonable, even unfair, to expect anyone to have to deal with the blowback from their own choices.

That’s a pervasive notion these days, and its effects show up in an astonishing array of contexts throughout contemporary culture, but yes, it’s particularly apparent when it comes to the way children get raised in the United States these days.

The interesting thing here is that the children aren’t necessarily happy about that.

If you’ve ever watched a child systematically misbehave in an attempt to get a parent to react, you already know that kids by and large want to know where the limits are.

It’s the adults who want to give tests and then demand that nobody be allowed to fail them, who insist that everybody has to get an equal share of the goodies no matter how much or little they’ve done to earn them, and so on through the whole litany of attempts to erase the reality that actions have consequences.

That erasure goes very deep. Have you noticed, for example, that year after year, at least here in the United States, the Halloween monsters on public display get less and less frightening? These days, far more often than not, the ghosts and witches, vampires and Frankenstein’s monsters splashed over Hallmark cards and window displays in the late October monster ghetto have big goofy grins and big soft eyes.

The wholesome primal terrors that made each of these things iconic in the first place—the presence of the unquiet dead, the threat of wicked magic, the ghastly vision of walking corpses, whether risen from the grave to drink your blood or reassembled and reanimated by science run amok—are denied to children, and saccharine simulacra are propped up in their places.

Here again, children aren’t necessarily happy about that. The bizarre modern recrudescence of the Victorian notion that children are innocent little angels tells me, if nothing else, that most adults must go very far out of their way to forget their own childhoods.

Children aren’t innocent little angels; they’re fierce little animals, which is of course exactly what they should be, and they need roughly the same blend of gentleness and discipline that wolves use on their pups to teach them to moderate their fierceness and live in relative amity with the other members of the pack.

Being fierce, they like to be scared a little from time to time; that’s why they like to tell each other ghost stories, the more ghoulish the better, and why they run with lolling tongues toward anything that promises them a little vicarious blood and gore. The early twentieth century humorist Ogden Nash nailed it when he titled one of his poems “Don’t Cry, Darling, It’s Blood All Right.”

Traditional fairy tales delighted countless generations of children for three good and sufficient reasons.

• First of all, they’re packed full of wonderful events.
  
• Second, they’re positively dripping with gore, which as already noted is an instant attraction to any self-respecting child.
  
• Third, they’ve got a moral—which means, again, that they are about consequences. 

The selfish, cruel, and stupid characters don’t get patted on the head, given the same prize as everyone else, and shielded from the results of their selfishness, cruelty, and stupidity; instead, they get gobbled up by monsters, turned to stone by witches’ curses, or subjected to some other suitably grisly doom. It’s the characters who are honest, brave, and kind who go on to become King or Queen of Everywhere.

Such things are utterly unacceptable, according to the approved child-rearing notions of our day.

Ask why this should be the case and you can count on being told that expecting a child to have to deal with the consequences of its actions decreases it’s self-esteem. No doubt that’s true, but this is another of those many cases where people in our society manage not to notice that the opposite of one bad thing is usually another bad thing.

Is there such a thing as too little self-esteem?

Of course—but there is also such a thing as too much self-esteem. In fact, we have a common and convenient English word for somebody who has too much self-esteem. That word is “jerk.”

The cult of self-esteem in contemporary pop psychology has thus produced a bumper crop of jerks in today’s America. I’m thinking here, among many other examples, of the woman who made the news a little while back by strolling right past the boarding desk at an airport, going down the ramp, and taking her seat on the airplane ahead of all the other passengers, just because she felt she was entitled to do so.

When the cabin crew asked her to leave and wait her turn like everyone else, she ignored them; security was called, and she ignored them, too.

They finally had to drag her down the aisle and up the ramp like a sack of potatoes, and hand her over to the police. I’m pleased to say she’s up on charges now.

That woman had tremendous self-esteem. She esteemed herself so highly that she was convinced that the rules that applied to everyone else surely couldn’t apply to her—and that’s normally the kind of attitude you can count on from someone whose self-esteem has gone up into the toxic-overdose range.

Yet the touchstone of excessive self-esteem, the gold standard of jerkdom, is the complete unwillingness to acknowledge the possibility that actions have consequences and you might have to deal with those, whether you want to or not.

That sort of thing is stunningly common in today’s society. It was that kind of overinflated self-esteem that convinced affluent liberals in the United States and Europe that they could spend thirty years backing policies that pandered to their interests while slamming working people face first into the gravel, without ever having to deal with the kind of blowback that arrived so dramatically in the year just past.

Now Britain is on its way out of the European Union, Donald Trump is mailing invitations to his inaugural ball, and the blowback’s not finished yet.

Try to point this out to the people whose choices made that blowback inevitable, though, and if my experience is anything to go by, you’ll be ignored if you’re not shouted down.

On an even greater scale, of course, there’s the conviction on the part of an astonishing number of people that we can keep on treating this planet as a combination cookie jar to raid and garbage bin to dump wastes in, and never have to deal with the consequences of that appallingly shortsighted set of policies.

That’s as true in large swathes of the allegedly green end of things, by the way, as it is among the loudest proponents of smokestacks and strip mines.

I’ve long since lost track of the number of people
 I’ve met who insist loudly on how much they love the Earth and how urgent it is that “we” protect the environment, but who aren’t willing to make a single meaningful change in their own personal consumption of resources and production of pollutants to help that happen.

Consequences don’t go away just because we don’t want to deal with them. That lesson is being taught right now on low-lying seacoasts around the world, where streets that used to be well above the high tide line reliably flood with seawater when a high tide meets an onshore wind.

• It’s being taught on the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica, which are moving with a decidedly un-glacial rapidity through a trajectory of collapse that hasn’t been seen since the end of the last ice age
  
• I’s being taught in a hundred half-noticed corners of an increasingly dysfunctional global economy, as the externalized costs of technological progress pile up unnoticed and drag economic activity to a halt.
  
• And of course it’s being taught, as already noted, in the capitals of the industrial world, where the neoliberal orthodoxy of the last thirty years is reeling under the blows of a furious populist backlash.

It didn’t have to be learned that way.

We could have learned it from Krampus or the old Santa Claus, the one who was entirely willing to leave a badly behaved child’s stocking empty on Christmas morning except for that single eloquent lump of coal.

We could have learned it from the fairy tales that taught generations of children that consequences matter; we could have learned it from any number of other sources, given a little less single-minded a fixation on maximizing self-esteem right past the red line on the meter—but enough of us didn’t learn it that way, and so here we are.

I’d therefore like to encourage those of my readers who have young children in their lives to consider going out and picking up a good old-fashioned collection of fairy tales, by Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm, and use those in place of the latest mass-marketed consequence-free pap when it comes to storytelling time.

The children will thank you for it, and so will everyone who has to deal with them in their adult lives.

Come to think of it, those of my readers who don’t happen to have young children in their lives might consider doing the same thing for their own benefit, restocking their imaginations with cannibal giants and the other distinctly unmodern conveniences thereof, and benefiting accordingly.

And if, dear reader, you are ever tempted to climb into the lap of the universe and demand that it fork over a long list of goodies, and you glance up expecting to see the jolly and long-suffering face of Santa Claus beaming down at you, don’t be too surprised if you end up staring in horror at the leering yellow eyes and lolling tongue of Krampus instead, as he ponders whether you’ve earned a thrashing with the birch switch or a ride in the wicker basket.

Or perhaps the great furry face of the Solstice bear, the beast of Alban Arthuan, as she blinks myopically at you for a moment before she either shoves you from her lap with one powerful paw, or tears your arm off and gnaws on it meditatively while you bleed to death on the cold, cold ground.

Because the universe doesn’t care what you think you deserve.

It really doesn’t—and, by the way, the willingness of your fellow human beings to take your wants and needs into account will by and large be precisely measured by your willingness to do the same for them.

And on that utterly seasonal note, I wish all my fellow Druids a wonderful solstice; all my Christian friends and readers, a very merry Christmas; and all my readers, whatever their faith or lack thereof, a rekindling of light, hope, and sanity in a dark and troubled time.

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