Member-only story
The True Meaning of Christmas (And the Saturnalia).
When the Sun hits rock bottom.
I am not going to lie, all I want to do right now is sleep and watch fantasy television.
Which makes sense. With the Solstice preceding Christmas by only a couple days this is the time of year with the least amount of energy. The warmth, the light, even the harvest of crops and their calories generated by the Sun are in their low tide.
It makes sense that our bodies have evolved to sleep it all away.
If not for coffee, advertising, and street lamps that’s what Christmas would become: a day of rest, lazing around with the family.
As much as a part of me wants this I realized the ancients didn’t exactly sit around taking naps.
They invoked their gods, pacified their spirits and the dead, and worked their sympathetic magic. . . magic reflected in our traditions of gift-giving, trees, and Christmas lights.
When we reach the year’s rock bottom the energy has to shift (think Yin to Yang) and so for better or worse we invoke our magic.
The Yin-Yang Christmas.
It is the theory of Daoism that the active and passive energies cycle one into the other to restore their properties.
The year starts with the Yang of Tree/Wood energy in Spring, turns into the excitement of Fire in Summer when energy is so abundant it is nearly free, passes through Earth where it begins to settle in harvest, collects in the Metal of autumn where we begin to conserve, and moves into the Water of Winter where we sleep and dream.
In this way, the Winter balances the extremes of Summer. This also means that the heat and life of Summer is germinated here in the darkest night of Winter.
While the seasons cycle with or without our theories this look at energy holds particularly true for living beings and our reactions to the seasons.
The heat and warmth of Summer is a crescendo of energy. In ancient times this meant more energy for hunting and harvest. Today it means more energy for travel, outdoor activities, household projects, games, and partying.
