“Imagine, for a second, a different ritual, one that begins at the stroke of midnight on the longest night of the year. You slip into your child’s room, gently wake them with a kiss and whisper into that little ear, “I have something wonderful, something epic and thrilling to tell you, something so large and magnificent that no human being can stop it: starting tomorrow the days will start getting longer again, and slowly the plants will bloom again, the sunshine will return. Summer is coming”.
Maybe with the aid of a diagram or a globe and a flashlight, you can teach your little one why this is so. And remind them to think of the people of the Southern hemisphere who are, at this very moment, enjoying the shortest night of the year, but tomorrow their days will begin to shrink, their winter will slowly approach, inch by inch, and in six months we’ll have traded places.
Countless holidays around the world pay tribute to the motion of the Earth around the sun.
We’ve known and celebrated these phenomena for millennia, we just ascribe different meanings to fit our changing cultures and religions.
There is, of course, another argument for holidays: tradition. There is a pleasure in repeating the rituals and recipes of your ancestors, it’s a kind of connectedness, a kind of special time travel. I connect to that completely.
My husband, who was raised Christian, and I light the menorah on Hanukkah and exchange gifts with his family under the Christmas tree. We like these traditions. But even they are rooted in Pagan rituals and were originally used to mark the passage of time.
Someday when we have children of our own we’ll awaken them at midnight on the longest night of the year. We’ll tell them that our ancestors, all of our ancestors, contemplated with awe the Earth’s place in the universe. And we carry on that tradition tonight.” Sasha Sagan