Yule Love Saturnalia

Welcome to the Golden Age, or at least the celebration of it, called Saturnalia.  According to Roman myth, and the much older traditions on which it was based, Saturn ruled over a period when humans lived in eternal bliss, food literally dripped off the trees and things were generally pretty darned good.

From the viewpoint of the Northern Hemisphere, the Sun reaches its lowest point in the southern sky and on 21 December.  At this point, winter begins and the Sun appears to "die" for three days, as it ceases to move in any direction north or south relative to the horizon.

On 25 December, the Sun is "reborn," as it begins its months-long trip northward again, culminating in the Summer Solstice on 21 July.  As the Sun "dies," the original King of the Gods - Saturn - once again takes control of the Heavens and for a brief time, the Golden Age returns.

Saturnalia was marked by the suspension of social norms.  Wild parties ensued, with people exchanging gifts, slaves being treated like house guests, and lavish feasts that sought to recreate the Golden Age of plenty.  People disguised as Cronus/Saturn, with great white beards, would tote sacks of gifts around, tossing goodies to random children as a good luck token, since any one of the children could be the young New Year in disguise.  Special lamps were lit all night to provide the light that the dying Sun could not.

As the Roman empires spread into northern Europe, aspects of the Germanic winter festival, called Yuletide, were added to Saturnalia.  Evergreen trees symbolizing Eternal Life were cut down and set up in public areas, decorated with candles and glittery glass objects to catch and reflect the light.  Groups of people would wander around singing traditional Yule songs.  Special Yule logs coated with cobalt, copper and other minerals were tossed on bonfires to add multi-colored flames to the festivities.  Feasts eventually centered around roasted boar, a favorite of the Germanic people.

The festivities ended on 25 December, with the birth of the Sun.  The 12 days of feasting and partying gave way to the somber reality of winter, as they retreated indoors for the next three months, until the resurrection of life in the spring.

Saturnalia would then give way to the Feast of Janus, the two-faced god of thresholds, who stood on the dividing line between inner and outer, past and future.  Old man Cronus would surrender to the infant Sun, now slowly rising again in the sky.  Darkness and death would eventually become light and life once again.

The festival was so wildly popular that the emperor Constantine could not stop it in favor of his new christian religion.  Instead, the birth of the Sun became the birth of the Son.  The plethora of Roman and Germanic gods were replaced with a single deity and a Christian veneer was cast over the proceedings.

Vestiges remained and proved hard to squelch.  Old man Cronus became Santa Claus, Yule songs were replaced with Christmas carols and the evergreen trees - symbols of Eternal Life - took on more symbolic roles.  The festival proved so popular and enduring that two thousand years later it has become a global event marked with gift-giving and sparkly decorations, and even here in the tropics and in the Southern Hemisphere, the imagery of snow cannot be extricated from the celebration.

The next time someone tells you that Christmas is a sober holiday celebrating the birth of the Son, you can say with certainty that it is actually synonymous with wild parties and extravagant feasts, and that the New Year celebration is the one that is supposed to be a sullen and somber reflection on the passing of time, things lost and things to come.

In the meantime, I'll have another mug of eggnog, hold the egg, and would you mind carving off another chunk of roast boar for me?

Resolved: Fresh Resolutions

I've never been one for New Year's resolutions. They are pretty much forgotten within hours of making them, and nothing about some magical date is going to change behavior that has taken years to acquire. And once bronken, I start to get depressed because I have failed at my earnest intentions, and that just leads to Xanx abuse and a methadone habit that is just one more resolution to break next year.

So better to stop before it starts, I always say.

What I decided years ago was to make resolutions that can't be broken, which protects my fragile self-esteem and gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling a victory every year.

So examples? Well, this year I have resolved to eat something. I resolved to get my hair cut. I resolved to change the sheets on the bed this year. I've resolved to brush my teeth, read a book and watch more than one movie before 2012.

The beauty of this scheme is that I've already kept most of my resolutions, and it's only January 3rd. I have kept my promises to myself, built of my fagile self-esteem and I feel like a winner all at the same time!

One thing that has always mystified me, though, is why January 1st? Of all the cosmically and strologically significant dates trough-out the year, why the dead of northern winter, and if it must, then why not winter solstice or something like that? After all, January 1st has become one of the few, if not the only truly global holidays, even though there are half a dozen other new year celebrations throughout the year.

Turns out the answer is a complete jumble of different traditons. Of course, the damn Romans figure into this, as they do in just about everything, it seems. To begin with, the month of January is named after the Roman god Janus, who had two faces, one looking at the future and the other lokking at the past. He was the god of, among other things, doors and new beginnings. So far so good.

Now, it happens that European christians in the Middle Ages drwq up calendars by writing the months in columns beginning with January. After all, it was named ofter the god of new bigginings, right? Kind of like the convention of starting weeks on Sunday or Monday, depending on how your personal calendar was designed.

Now, under the old Julian calendar, the year would have started on January 14, by our current reckoning.. When the calendar was reformed by Pope Gregory XIII, in the 1100s, it whacked off 11 days to move some feasts back to their traditional dates of celebration (they had shifted over time since the Julian calendar didn't correct for the quarter day left over each year). The Russian and Greek Orthodox chruches still use the Julian calendar, which is why they celebrate Christmas on January 6th and New Year's on January 14th.

So that's part of the story. The other part is those whacky pagans in northern Europe that had a holiday called Yule. Yule was/is a winter festival whose central idea is 'reviving the Sun' during the darkest part of the northern solar cycle. It involved, among other things, setting up evergreen trees, burning special logs, lots of eating and drinking, setting out food for the house-elf (Harry Potter anyone?), and exchanging gifts on the last day of the holiday, which was what? You guessed it. New Year's day.

Most of those practices have been absorbed into what most people today think of as Christmas traditions. The house-elf has been replaced by Santa Claus, thanks to Coca-Cola. The exchange of small, carved, magical figurines has been replaced with an orgy of consumer secularism. But, the basics are still there.

Ultimately, what we have here is a fusion of Roman, Celtic pagan and even Asian traditions. After all, the use of fireworks, horns and other noise-makers is an old Asian ctustom to scare off evil spirits. Obviously, the holiday has become a global one because it incorporated somethng from so many different traditions.

We can't forget that for the purposes of business and accounting, you have to start the year somewhere, so you have a cut-off point and a roll-over point. Since Janus was the god of new beginnings, heck, just as well to choose January 1st. Nice thing about Indonesia is we get four New Year holidays. The next is March 3rd, for Imlec, the Chinese New Year. The there's the Hindu and Muslim new years coming up later. About the only one we don't get here is the Jewish New Year.

It's always been amazing to me how the Romans have gotten their paws into just about everything everywhere. How did they do that? And why do we still have months named after Julius and Augustus? And why are the last four months of the year named after Roman numbers, and the wrong ones at that?! I guess it's for the same reason our days are named after heavenly bodies and Norse gods, or that there are seven days in a week because that was how many things moved in the sky when the Babylonians looked up. So many vestiges of ancient things, and we so rarely think about them.

Everything old is new again, I guess.