About the Candle
This year, I wanted to rediscover Christmas and the many meanings surrounding the holiday season. So many symbols, so much forgotten or never learned about why we use them.
A Christmas favorite of mine has always been a candle.I think it reminds me of growing up in the Catholic Church. The votive lights arrayed and flickering in front of the statues were always one of my favorite things about church.
Here was something tangible, something I recognized from the world beyond the church doors. Here was a ritual I could take part in. The chink of coins in the little box. Carefully choosing a taper and the candle to light. Transferring the flame from a lit candle. Then focusing a prayer on that hopeful little light, as if somehow the candle could carry the prayer where it needed to go.
I speculated about those little candles. What made them different from candles anywhere else? Were they specially formulated? Prayed over? Blessed with holy water? If you bought votive candles at a store, and took them home, and performed the same ritual there, would it work?
It's that same blending of the mundane and the sacred that still appeals to me about the candle. They have a universality to them as well. So few symbols of spirituality embrace as many forms of belief and practice.
And finally, after I'd checked out a shelf full of books from the San Francisco Public Library, I discovered another layer of meaning within the Christmas candle. In Scandinavian countries, there's a tradition to leave a large candle to burn all through the night on winter solstice, to chase away evil spirits thought to roam most freely that night, and to encourage the return of the sun. Sometimes they put the candle inside a ring of salt.
It's another one of those ancient Yule traditions eventually transplanted to Christmas.
So this year, at my house, we will burn two big, fat candles...one on December 21, one on December 24. And of course, Candlegrove's candle will burn for 24 days, until the New Year.
Here's what the swirl of text says:
"When one combines a process of inquiry with content of beauty and antiquity, when, even as a lark, one opens the flow of archetypal images contained in the history and legends of people long negated by this culture, many who confront these images are going to take to them and begin a journey unimagined by those who started the process."
--Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon