The Light is Returning

When the Scribble Sisters meet, someone usually suggests a “prompt,” something to get the group thinking and writing. For the meeting on 12/23/20 (only two days after the Winter Solstice), the writing prompt was a piece in the New York Times, 12/20/20, entitled “How We Survive Winter,” by Elizabeth Dias

The three pieces that follow were written for that meeting.

 

The Third String of Lights 

by Claudia Dalton

It’s a lonely-feeling Christmas season this year of the pandemic.  No parties with happy friends standing shoulder to shoulder and exchanging cheer. No shopping with abandon—now we time it to when the store is its emptiest and then keep our time there to a minimum.   No admittance to our old New England church solemn and splendid in holiday candles, wreaths, and poinsettias. No guests in the house; no prospect of children visiting on Christmas Day in the morning.

But still the momentum of the memory of decades of happy Christmases pushes us forward. We decorate and then text our friends and family photos of how things are looking.  We wrap gifts to send in the mail instead of put under our tree. We bake cookies, cupcakes,  and breads to mail or just to leave in a friend’s mailbox. We do feel the holiday spirit seep through our beings. We feel deeply grateful for remaining healthy one more day but are deeply sad for all those who have died in the past eleven months.

It’s a lonely-feeling Christmas season this year of the pandemic. Every night after locking the doors and turning off the lights downstairs, I spend a few minutes sitting in the living room by the light of our Christmas tree. It’s tabletop sized and is on a heavy chest in front of our bow window. My husband has long gone upstairs to bed followed a bit later by Patty, our Brittany. But Danny, our Westie, always stays downstairs until I go up to bed, so I am not entirely alone. I carry him to the couch with me to admire the lights.

I leave the hall light on so I’ll see my way upstairs after turning the tree lights off for the night. One evening this past week after bending way down behind the chest to unplug the two sets of lights (one white, the other multicolored), I suddenly realized the hall light was not on and that it would be dark. But as I straightened up to see what I was going to do next, I found I wasn’t in the dark after all.

The tree was still lit.  I hadn’t taken into account that we now have a new third string of lights—and these are battery-operated so they don’t plug into the wall. They are Mercury glass bulbs about the size of a ping pong ball that were an early Christmas gift from a dear friend.  The bronze glow of these bulbs was enough to see by and I had no trouble getting to the light switch in the hallway.

The third string of lights was a nice surprise.
It’s the type of thing we hang our hopes on: that something unexpected will help us out.
And it needn’t be a big thing; bronze bulbs aren’t a huge deal. There’s an ancient Persian saying that if you can’t afford to have a big mid-winter feast you only need to bring a flower.

The third string of lights was a nice surprise.
It’s the type of thing we hang our hopes on:
that things are not actually as dark as they seem. That there is God-given provision and protection for us.  That change for the better is possible both within us and in the world.
It only takes one person to make the life of another person better. Charles Dickens brought this home to us in “A Christmas Carol.” Thanks to Scrooge’s momentous change of heart, destiny was altered and Tiny Tim was saved from dying of poverty and neglect.

May hope light our way this Christmas
through these dark times and beyond.

 

Not Quite Yet

by Marianne DeKoven

I’m having trouble feeling fully the profound beauty and comfort of “How We Survive Winter.”  The closest I can come is the feeling I get from Christmas lights on streets and houses–a feeling of fun and joy, humor and play.  Because I grew up in the Jewish tradition, deeper feelings come for me from the Hanukkah menorah: reverence, reflection, and the power of persistence.  There are also fun, food, presents and play, of course.  But in my family’s practice, which I think is common, we let the candles burn all the way down and extinguish themselves.  They have their own death, their own end.  They flare right before they die.  My daughter Maggie, when she was very young, wrote a poem about the Hanukkah candles—how they “springed and tosseded” right before they went out.

I think it’s crucial to acknowledge death, not just as part of the cycle of life, but as an end.  My adored childhood parakeet, and all our adored dogs, really died and didn’t come back.  My father died; my mother died.  I don’t believe in an afterlife.  The fact that they live on in my memory doesn’t do enough work of consolation.

The photos in “How We Survive the Winter” do move me deeply, especially those by Erinn Springer.  They make me feel the primal association of winter with isolation, old age, pain and death, really the opposites of what the written text suggests. Though the text does acknowledge those associations, it turns quickly toward light, warmth, comfort and hope.  The photos, on the other hand, seem to me to speak directly to the suspension of light we live in now, before the vaccine and Joe Biden have a chance to restore us, in which the massive Covid suffering and the death throes of a madman in the White House still hover over our world.

A poem by Robert Frost called “Fire and Ice” comes to mind for me, as a sort of insistence that the dark, deathly world of winter is real and definitive in itself, not just as a harbinger of returning light or an opportunity for life-affirming human interconnection and community.

Here it is:

“Fire and Ice”

By Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

This poem is so tight and bounded in its form, as if each word is spit out through clenched teeth.  It feels like rage, like thrown punches.  Fire here is not an antidote to the loneliness and freezing death of winter.  It’s a desire that is ravening, deathly, like the fires of hell.  The destruction it brings is absolute, total, sure-fire.  But the ice of winter is in a way even worse.  It’s associated with a double death.  Ice is hate.  Not hatred, but hate, a noun here but usually a very active verb.  I hate, you hate, she hates, he hates, we hate, they hate.  Hasn’t that hating become so common?  I feel it.

I have violated the intent of this prompt, I know.  I’m sorry.  I do hope soon to be able to feel fully the beauty, affirmation and hope of  “The Light is Returning.”

The Dark Side of the Year

by Kathy Wagenknecht

The New York Times published a wonderful piece entitled “How We Survive Winter,” on Monday, Dec 21, 2020, the Winter Solstice. It describes ways that peoples of the Northern Hemisphere celebrate the return of the light through holidays such as Diwali, Hanukah, Advent, and Christmas, all rooted in ancient Solstice ceremonies.

It also describes how survival of the winter was a far from certain thing for our ancestors who depended on their own agricultural, hunting and storing skills to make it through the time of famine and cold.

This year, it seems that our survival of the winter is a far from certain thing. Not because of starvation, although a growing section of the population is indeed hungry, having lost their jobs through shut-downs of large swaths of normal commerce.

This year, in the darkness is a virus. An opportunistic primitive life form that invades its hosts, causing illness and sometimes death, as it seeks to live, to replicate itself and spread. To mutate as it goes so that is it more effective at reproduction. More able to invade through a rapid evolution of weaponry, like the Mongols under Genghis Khan suddenly getting AK-47s. The invaded succumbed.

We could all succumb if we fail to be watchful. During the long nights, we cannot go tripping across the fields, barefoot, to visit with neighbors or share a meal. We must stay at home, shuttered inside, hoarding our provisions in our solitude.

But then, as it was foretold by the ancients, the Solstice arrives: the sun reaches its dimmest point and starts bringing back its light. And with it, a “Christmas Star,” an alignment of planets that creates a bright spot of hope in the night sky. A promise for generations.

And we, the invaded, have another light to celebrate. We have a new weapon. We bring it out with the light. A vaccination. Icy cold but stronger than the virus. And it shines its hope into the darkness.