Keeping Vigil for the Solstice Sun

The celebration of Yule is starting early here at Casa de TeamFun. I wanted to share this article I recently found with you all as a result. :)

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by Catherine Harper

There are many stories told at Yule, and perhaps this is inevitable, for winter and darkness breed the weaving of stories. In our house, we have celebrated Yule as Longest Night, and the story of our gathering has become that long, dark night, the fires we keep burning throughout it and the food and revelry that sustain our bodies and spirits. While for myself I have mostly given up on keeping vigil the whole night through, and most of us get at least some sleep, it is still a weary band of revelers who gather in the morning to watch the dark sky turn first grey and then silver and then pink with dawn.

It is not a bad tradition, not at all. But I'm wondering this year if the revels of the night don't dull us a little -- wear us out and weary us so that we hardly see the dawn. I am thinking that while we celebrate Yule mostly in the darkness of the Sun's absence, it is a holiday that celebrates not the darkness, nor even truly the light that we make against darkness, but the night that is finite -- as the season is finite -- and that will end with the rising of the Sun.

The first story I remember knowing about this longest night and its morning is one that until recently I assumed everyone knew. I am not sure exactly where I heard it first -- I seem to remember hearing it at a Society for Creative Anachronism gathering and at a Yule party held at the house that many of us rented together. If I heard it seldom later, I assumed that it was because it had been told too often.

Once upon a time, on the longest night of the year, a young man was sent out of the great hall that was brightly lit and filled with food and song. He was given a horn filled with burning coals in a layer of ash, and set to climb to the top of the highest hill, where the people have piled up a large quantity of dry wood. He was to light this wood and make a bonfire, which would call back the Sun from the darkness in which she was sleeping.

And so the tale went. The young man made his long cold walk, and along his way he met three people on the road, each of them without shelter that night, and desperately poor. In each case he stopped, a little reluctantly, and gave them a coal from his supply, and then hurried on. But when he reached the top of the hill he found that the coals he had left had burnt out, and that he had failed in his task. But it was not the way of the world that his act of mercy should condemn all to live forever in darkness, so the fire lit itself, and the Sun was called back.

Over the years, I wondered a lot about this story. Sometimes I told it to children, but its shape didn't always please me. It seemed too naive a conceit that he believed that by not lighting his single fire he would plunge the world forever into darkness. And I didn't want him to be quite that naive, for he was chosen for this task because he was the most promising of the youths and I did not want to condescend so to the ancestors. Nor did I want to have them live, even in story, in a world where the gods are such accountants or where miracles are so convenient. It is perhaps a fairytale, and yet the brilliance of the bonfire seemed to pass over the glory of the dawn. There is mercy and magic in this world without cheap theatrics. And so the story changed in my telling, bit by bit.

The young man, realizing that his coals were dead, turned out the charcoal and ashes from his horn on the ground, searching among them for a spark from which he could kindle a blaze, but in vain. The ash was grey, the charcoal black, and there was only a memory of warmth with them, which passed swiftly in the chill night air.

And yet then, I wondered, what was the point? He gave his coals away, and didn't light the fire. He sat by the fire all through the night, too proud and too ashamed to go back to his people and admit his failure. And the Sun came up anyway. Was I saying the ritual didn't matter? That his acts were of no importance? That wasn't the story I wanted to tell. What he did was intensely important, for all that the world didn't grant him a simple, easy-to-understand reward or accolade.

But there is magic and reward aplenty in the world, for those who can find them. I wondered how it would be to sit shivering beside a pile of wood through the last hours of a winter's night, unable to light it. Even though the Sun would rise, long before then his people would see the hill, still dark, and know he had failed. I thought of him beginning to curse the people he had helped, blaming them for their own need and his humiliation. And in that, I found my end to the story.

But then, away from the cold of midwinter, he felt in himself a small flame. Not kindled by their hands, but by his. This was not the end he sought, sitting alone on a hill in the dark. But this was the path he had chosen, chosen when he had stopped to help those that were in need. He had thought his help would be easy to give, and would cost him nothing more than a minute or two that he could quickly regain with his long legs. But if he had known the cost, would he have chosen otherwise?

Would it have been better to make another choice?

Far off in the East, the stars were fading, the sky barely, almost imperceptibly lightening. He sat there on the hilltop, watching the sky brighten into dawn. There is, he knew then, mercy in the world. And it came to him that he was part of it.

He was chosen because he was the swiftest, but he walked back slowly that winter morning. He came back a humbler man, and a wiser one, wondering how he would tell this strange story, for he had failed, and yet that failure had become a gift to him.

At Yule, we gather and make light for ourselves and celebrate with feast and song, for this is the longest, darkest night, and we are still alive and have the courage to sing against the dark. It is easy to gloss over the long dark of winter these days, and yet even for those of us who love the night I think it is important to acknowledge the power the night and winter hold.

Do you think that as a pagan, with a chest full of candles, you are well-prepared for darkness? Try going a few days without artificial light. Candles are wonderful to eat and converse by, but even fairly bright oil lamps leave a lot to be desired when it comes to reading, washing dishes, finding one's glasses or other more detailed work. We have sometimes lost power for several days, always in the winter. Even though we are well-equipped with lamps and our wood-burning stove and oven, after a few days I find myself wishing the Sun would set later and spare us a little longer from the oppression of darkness. And yet we do not feel winter in our bones the way many of our ancestors must have.

But even if the tangible cold and darkness of winter are mostly metaphors for us, in each of our lives there are winters, and long nights, and periods of darkness. Yule is about surviving. Sometimes it is about singing against the dark, sometimes it is about the light that we make for ourselves. Sometimes it's about clenching your teeth and sitting the long night with your failures. But more than anything, Yule is about seasons and turnings and changes. If we survive the night -- and most of us do, most of the time, even if none of us will forever -- there will always be dawn, and a new day.