It’s not a mistake that the Yuletide is at this time of the year. Many people are worn out with the exhaustion of enforced good cheer and believe that they don’t feel… whatever they are supposed to be feeling at this point of year.
We have passed through the longest night of the year. The sun returned the other day, the days have begun to grow longer, but this is barely perceptible. And in this world where we have artificial lights and live on our own schedules, our bodies feel the same depressions, the same anxiety that our ancestors felt. Only we no longer know why.
We are afraid of the dark. The sky is dark and often gloomy. The world is cold. The first part of winter the world rests, and at one point in time we would have rested as well. We are afraid to rest. Long ago, and in many cultures even now this was the time for storytelling, especially telling tales of wonder. But we don’t have time to wonder any more. Adulthood is measured by how busy we are, how unwilling we are to believe in any reality save the limited one we set down for ourselves.
So at the darkest time of the year, we make our own light. We take responsibility for bringing light back into the world and this truly religious know that. True religion? What is that anyway? True connection. A Catholic has it. A Protestant has it. So does a Pagan, an agnostic, someone who calls himself an atheists because he can’t believe in the religion that has been handed him, in the stories she has been told. But all of us are able to feel the connection that manifests itself in a sort of personal responsibility for bringing in the light when there is no light to be seen. And we are not alone. That is part of the connection. We are not wholly left to our singularly and all too quickly exhausted devices. Prometheus shows up with the torch of fire from heaven. God permits the oil to burn in the candelabra just enough days for more oil to arrive at the Temple. In every culture, in the bleak midwinter, the Holy Child is born, something out of nothing, a small spark in the bitter cold.

When peaceful stillness compassed everything,
and the night in its swift course was half spent,
Your all powerful Word from heaven’s royal throne
Leapt down into the doomed land…


Riding home on the bus from the last of the Christmas shopping: the inbound pulls into the parking lot of the Target and I hear a woman calling, “Tell him to wait for me! Don’t let him leave.”
When she gets on the bus she asks me where the SSI building is, and I tell her. She begins to tell me how she has none of her records accept for, I think, a grocery store food card. Then she burst into tears on the bus and begins to tell me how the day after Thanksgiving, her husband picked up a cigarette, lit it and dropped dead of a massive heart attack. Now she had nothing and was living with her sister-in-law.
“I’m so mad at him!” she was crying. “It’s not his fault, but I’m mad at him… And I mad at Him upstairs too… But I’m trying not to be.” She was I thought, literally mad with grief, in both senses of the word mad, and all I could do is sit and listen and try not to say anything stupid. Help how I could. That would be my Christmas present. The sky was so grey it was almost black and the precipitation went from snow to rain and back again. She had already walked around dazed in the rain, wanting to die, trying to make herself sick.
“I loved him. I miss him so much. And now he’s gone… How am I going to do Christmas this year? The only thing holding me together is my church…”
When she had said it a few times, I had the feeling she wanted to tell me about her church. So I asked what it was.
“First Missionary Baptists on Ironwood.”
I knew that part of being a good evangelical is plugging your church or your religion even when you are at your absolute worse, so I knew she had to get that in.
“It is the only thing…” she repeated. “I don’t know if I can make it.”
“You will make it,” it was the only definite thing I said the whole conversation. Well, I also told her that she could definitely expect to be frustrated at the Social Services bureau and that she might as well not even try to get to the DMV. But telling her she would make it was my last gift. It was not a wish or me talking out of head or any other part of my body. It was my will. She will make it. Losing a spouse is more than hell, but there are all sorts of hell and my personal miracle was being happy when I remember being her, so dazed that nothing meant anything, my life tipped over and tossed upside down. Wanting to die. I will light a candle for that woman tonight, Christmas Eve, and remember one of the greatest miracles there is: the miracle of all things, even the worst, passing…

In the bleak midwinter
Frosty winds made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron
Water like a stone
Snow had fallen, snow on snow
Snow on snow
In bleak midwinter
Long, long ago

write the witch: Dancing_House@hotmail.com