Pantoum: Solstice

We light candles now,
For this is the dying time;
A little fire in the long dark
To heal the wounded world.

For this is the dying time,
And all things pass in their hour
To heal the wounded world.
Give way now to the cold and dark.

And all things pass in their hour:
Green and light and good cheer
Give way now to the cold and dark
All through this longest of long nights.

Green and light and good cheer:
Keep close and safe some part of each
All through this longest of long nights;
The shadow in its turn will pass.

Keep close, and safe. Some part of each
Your bounteous goods bring to shared table.
The shadow in its turn will pass,
Yielding at last to new morning.

Your bounteous goods bring a shared table,
So keep your revels as a bright beacon
Yielding at last to new morning.
Let wine flow, and tend the welcoming hearth.

We keep our revels as a bright beacon,
A little fire in the long dark.
Let wine flow, and tend the welcoming hearth;
We light candles now.

I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving

BODY: Holy crap, it sure is getting cold. Winter must be coming.
MIND: It sure is! It'll be the Solstice soon.
BODY: We'd better stock up on lots of fatty and sugary food, then, for the long trek across the tundra. You never know when the next mammoth is going to come along.
MIND: Actually, we don't need to do that any more. Remember? We got civilization about, oh, six or eight thousand years ago. You really should keep up.
BODY: Oh, right right right. But we'll still need to build up reserves for when the frost lifts and we'll be working from dawn to dusk in the fields, tilling the hard soil.
MIND: Yeah, not so much. Subsistence farming isn't the default for human beings any more either. We talked about this last year. And the year before that.
BODY: But... We're in the northern hemisphere! It's cold! Without the extra fat, we could die!
MIND: Have you seen us lately? Not exactly lacking in that department. Plus, we live in a nice house with central heating. And fleece blankets. We'll be fine.
BODY: But... Pumpkin pie!
MIND: Well, that does sound pretty good, but...
BODY: PUMPKIN PIE! PUMPKIN PIE!
MIND: All right, dammit. Go get us a fork.

Merry Measure: Epilogue

It's officially the close of the season; happy Twelfth Night, everyone. For your imminent Epiphany, this Magian gift: the enormously talented Cat Valente, who seems to be assuming the mantle of the new century's Angela Carter, has a Winter Queen speech at Green Man Review for an issue dedicated to her work. It is lovely and moving and full of her strange magic, so go thou and read.

Sir Toby. ...Does not our life consist of the four elements?
Sir Andrew. Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking.
Sir Toby. Th'art a scholar! Let us therefore eat and drink.

- Twelfth Night II:iii

And blessed be, all every one.

Ring Out, Ring In

I've spent all the time between my last post and now either out of town or sick or both, and between that and the impending post-holiday blues I'm still a bit short of vitality, but nevertheless: Happy New Year, everyone. Here's hoping the best of what's passed is the worst of what's to come.

Merry Measure: Coda

(I swear I was going to post this today even before I read Sarah Daisy's comment on the previous entry's LJ crosspost.)

DO I DETECT A NOTE OF UNSEASONAL GRUMPINESS? said Death. NO SUGAR PIGGYWIGGY FOR YOU, ALBERT.

"I don't want any present, master," Albert sighed. "Except maybe to wake up and find it's all back to normal. Look, you know it always goes wrong when you start changing things..."

BUT THE HOGFATHER CAN CHANGE THINGS. LITTLE MIRACLES ALL OVER THE PLACE, WITH MANY A MERRY HO, HO, HO. TEACHING PEOPLE THE REAL MEANING OF HOGSWATCH, ALBERT.

"What, you mean the pigs and cattle have all been slaughtered and with any luck everyone's got enough food for the winter?"

WELL, WHEN I SAY THE REAL MEANING...

"Some wretched devil's had his head chopped off in a wood somewhere 'cos he found a bean in his dinner and now the summer's going to come back?"

NOT EXACTLY THAT, BUT...

"Oh, you mean they've chased down some poor beast and shot arrows up into their apple trees and now the shadows are going to go away?"

THAT IS DEFINITELY A MEANING, BUT I...

"Ah, then you're talking about the one where they light a bloody big bonfire to give the sun a hint and tell it to stop lurking under the horizon and do a proper day's work?"

Death paused, while the hogs hurtled over a range of hills.

YOU'RE NOT HELPING, ALBERT.

"Well, they're all the real meanings that I know."

I THINK THAT YOU COULD WORK WITH ME ON THIS.

"It's all about the sun, master. White snow and red blood and the sun. Always has been."

VERY WELL, THEN. THE HOGFATHER CAN TEACH PEOPLE THE UNREAL MEANING OF HOGSWATCH.

Albert spat over the side of the sleigh. "Hah! 'Wouldn't It Be Nice If Everyone Was Nice,' eh?"

THERE ARE WORSE BATTLE CRIES.


- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather (obviously)

Also, Jeff Fecke at Shakesville makes a number of related and worthwhile points.

And with that, a very happy Solstice, everyone!

"Older than Memphis and Mankind"

The HPL Historical Society's holiday albums, collected together as An Unbearably Scary Solstice, look delightful, but the playlist seems to have one glaring omission, which I have endeavored to correct here. (To be fair, I'm sure it's not the first time such a thing has been attempted, but thus I contribute to the living folk tradition.)

Ahem -

On the 13th day of Mythos, Cthulhu gave to me:
13 polyps whistling
12 mi-go buzzing
11 daemons flauting
10 ghouls a-meeping
9 cultists chanting
8 nightgaunts tickling
7 byakhees flapping
6 deep ones baying
5 FORMLESS THINGS!
4 crawling worms
3 rat hordes
2 Great Old Ones
And a volume of necromancy.

Make the world a little better, and teach it to a child today.

Merry Measure

As I write this it is now (for the next couple hours, anyway) ten days until Christmas, and a week until Solstice. I've just about reconciled, though, that those two words mean pretty much the same thing to me.

I am not and never have been a Christian, except maybe in the vague fluffy Unitarian sense of "what Jesus said was so nice, who cares if he was God or not" (and, when I'm in the right mood, the even vaguer and fluffier Alan Moore sense of "the idea of a god is a god," of course); as you can well imagine, the neocon War On Christmas paranoia reads to me like dispatches from Bizarro-World, because from where I sit, Christmas qua Christmas is freakin' everywhere, a cultural default. I've always sort of been of two minds about it, I suppose, because while the assumption that I'm buying into the same theology has made me uncomfortable for most of my life, I harbor a deep and shameless and uncompromising love of Christmas itself. I adore the lights, the decorations, the gifts, the overeating, and, unlike almost everyone else I know, I like to see it all get started just about as soon as October is through. Holly and evergreen and strings of light obviously speak to something profoundly resonant in me, which I suspect is nothing more complicated than the same thing that inspired folks in the northern hemisphere to first want to light fires and quaff wassail in the long nights of the year aeons past: it's cold and it's dark and if we don't do something fun we may give up and die of despair.

So I've come to understand that what I'm really celebrating at Christmas is the Yuletide, "older than Bethlehem and Babylon" (as Granpa HPL put it in a much creepier context), and calling it Christmas is a matter of cultural convenience and shorthand. I used to feel weirder about that, when I was first working out my identity as a pagan and aspiring magician and making like the important thing for me was observing the Solstice, but keeping Christmas at a distance never quite took. (Nowadays, I'm still inclined to want some sort of quasi-religious ritual on the Solstice proper, but it's in addition to, not instead of, the presents and revelry of the 25th, and I'm more and more of a mind that it's all part of one big Yule festival anyway.) I am in my heart a syncretist, which I suppose I must irritate alike both the religiously orthodox and the critics of cultural appropriation, what with my pentacle and my Ganesh puja and my heretical DIY patchwork pantheism; but I'm convinced there's a lot of good in the squishy lumper magpie approach to culture, collecting the shiny bits of diverse things together and discarding the parts that don't fit. So it is that I've come to understand that I've been observing the Good Parts Version of Christmas, and all the sanctimonious moralizing in the world about the "reason for the season" isn't going to make my experience of it any less authentic, even if what I mean by "Christmas" is something very different than what They do.

And what's in a name, anyway? Christos means "annointed one"; whether Son of Man or Sun Unconquered, the Mass we enact at the close of December is a crowning - a new day, a new beginning, the Kingdom of the world remade in a better and brighter light. Let Heaven and Nature sing! You don't need a Messiah in order to take comfort and joy in the hope that this time around will be better than the last, or just to be glad that it's only going to get sunnier from here for a while. (Although, while we're at it, you also don't need to believe in miracles in order to honor a great teacher who spent his life trying to convince people that charity and mercy and forgiveness are better than the alternatives, should you want a reason to keep the Christ in Christmas that's less vague and fluffy than mine.)

All of which is to say: Merry Christmas, everyone, whether you keep it for yourselves by that name or not; I trust that a bit of Midwinter cheer and Peace on Earth are things we can all get behind, even all you hard-line Scrooges out there. (And a very happy whatever-else-it-is you may observe around now as well, needless to say.) And here's a Yule cup raised to you as well, for the sake of good company in a dark hour and a warm hearth on a cold night. Gaudete, all; winter is coming, but there's light and green lingering yet, and soon the night will begin to fall back. If that's not reason enough for the season no matter what you call it, I don't know what is.

I Would've Come Sooner, But Death Was Too Strong

What can I say? I seem to have gone through my regularly-scheduled massively antisocial can't-be-bothered-with-human-contact wintery funk a whole season early this year. Let's all hope like hell that's done with.

I do in fact have some things I want to blog about now, but I'm afraid you'll have to wait just a little longer while I get my act together and quit waiting until the end of the night to do this stuff. You may think of this in the meantime as an Open Thread, if you like.

And while you're waiting, I offer you reason #6,314 why I wish I had a scanner, and you do too: beacuse then you'd be able to see the "Season's Greetings from the Daleks" holiday card some weirdo sent me this week. As it is, you'll just have to use your I-don't-doubt-vivid imaginations.

One Last Fire

Dear Mid-Atlantic Climate:

Plz to be getting on with Autumn now thxbai.

That is all.