December 2009

REsources for Living

BY LYNN UNGAR, MINISTER FOR LIFESPAN LEARNING, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP

What winter holidays (if any) do you celebrate? What traditions define the season for your family? For as long as my family has been a family (even before my daughter was born) as soon as December has rolled around we’ve dragged out the boxes from the attic or the basement or the garage and set up the Chanukah menorah in a window or on the mantle, strung little, sparkly lights in the eaves or along the porch or from the balcony, and we’ve decorated a tree (spruce, not fir) with a growing collection of treasures. The houses have changed, and even the people and their parts in the ceremony have altered as my daughter joined us, and then got big enough to hang ornaments.  (Maybe this year we’ll have her climb the ladder to put up the lights.)

But four years ago our holiday traditions altered. After several years of going to see a wonderful show called the Christmas Revels, we decided (all three of us) to audition to join the cast. And we were swept into a whole new way of celebrating the season. There was no time for elaborate decorations at home, but we sang and danced on a stage painted in glorious colors. We didn’t get around to Christmas cookies, since all my cooking time started going toward contributions toward backstage potluck feasts. We didn’t shop for party clothes, but we dressed up for days on end in intricate, amazing costumes. Each year the place and the time period of the show is different— frontier French Canada, Victorian England, a medieval castle, Bavaria— but the magic remains the same. We come together to build a community of song and dance and story, and then invite the audience to join that community of celebration with us.

For our family, the Christmas Revels is a fairly new tradition. But that magic—building a community of song and dance, of feasting and story—that magic is older, even, than Christmas itself. You see, the Christmas Revels is really the Winter Solstice Revels. And for longer than recorded history, people have gathered at the darkest time of the year to bring back the light. They’ve lit bonfires to call back the sun, and they’ve found new warmth and brightness in their own hearts by si nging and dancing the dark away.

And that’s the tradition that’s dearest to me for the season. I like to go to church on Christmas Eve. I like to light the Chanukah candles, to say the blessing and have latkes with sour cream and applesauce. I love the lights and the fragrant trees and the carols and the eggnog. But better than anything, I love the power of people coming together to make something bigger than any one of them: a multi-harmonied choir, a spiral dance, a feast built of many small contributions. I love that we have the power to honor the mystery of the dark, to sit in hushed stillness in a dimly lit hall to hear the click of antlers tapping together in a 900-yearold dance. I love that we have the power to make the sun rise in our hearts, as hundreds of people sing together a song of peace. I love that we hold onto the traditions of long-ago ancestors, and that each night we make something completely new.

What I love isn’t so much Christmas, or Chanukah or Kwanzaa or even the winter solstice. What I love is that we have the power as human beings to come together in celebration, to carve special times out of our everyday lives. I love that the darkest time of the year gives us an excuse to huddle together, to make warmth and brightness of our own.

Each year, in cities from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Oakland, California, different versions of the Christmas Revels are performed. But all of the performances, wherever the location, whatever the time period, whatever the theme, end with this poem by Susan Cooper, which sums up what I would want to say about the season:

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing, To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us—listen!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.