The winter solstice happens tomorrow.

I celebrate the solstice. Older than Christmas. More fundamental. Something purely mechanical. A small tick of the celestial clock. (The equinox perhaps the tock.)

A mechanical event that affects the biological. (Long nights, jet lag—we know how changes in light affect the Biological clock.)

Celebrated, or at least noted, by humans all over the northern hemisphere--whatever the calendar—whatever the century--whether it was called December or had a name or not--the longest night was recognized millennia earlier than the birth of Christ.

As one of the humans here on the planet, I think about what the Christmas season is about. Not the politically astute selection of December to celebrate the birth of a holy man who was more likely born in spring. But why do I go out in the cold to plug in little twinkly lights every night. Why the gifts and the cards and the preparation of special foods. Why the reaching out to family and friends no longer near. The gathering at churches on Christmas Eve to light candles. The gathering for parties.

What is this really about?

As sunlight retracts, we get--on a most animal level—sad and afraid. In the dark, we feel like giving up. We’re dying! We’re dying! Until we go—oh, right. Winter. Just like last year and the year before and before. We look around. It IS dark. What can we do?

It’s in the dark we acknowledge that it is good to be human among other humans, to share light and warmth and food, to become generous. We celebrate the birth of a baby. A lamp that burned a week on a day’s worth of oil. A day a minute shorter than the last. We give gifts, help the needy, light candles and strings of light. Raise our cups to say, Fuck the dark! Light our tiny lights against the big fear.

Until, again with the very regular mechanics of the planet within the solar system, the sun returns with spring.

Christmas is on a most basic level about the solstice. The celebration of a human manifestation of light against the mechanical manifestation of the Dark.

It’s about absence of light. It’s about Light.