Happy Solstice

This gardening column in the Washington Post today sums up our family's approach to this season. For the first time Sol is paying close attention to all of our ritualistic preparations and actions. He would have to in order to make some sense of it all. I certainly am trying to keep it straight. I wonder what it means as we unpack the Menorah, the Kinara, and the Christmas tree ornaments. I struggle with whether to send Hanukkah-themed holiday cards to Adam's family in Florida, and Christmas-themed cards to my family in South Carolina, or whether to send everyone the same Winter Solstice-themed card that we designed with a simple sun low in the sky next to a bare tree. We spend the morning mailing Christmas gifts, Sol and Luna singing about Santa Claus, the afternoon adding to our Solstice altar and deciding where to hang the pine cone bird feeder, while over dinner Adam and I are planning a Kwanzaa dinner with friends, the day finally culminating in a few rousing rounds of dreidel. The children take it all in stride, enjoying the lights, the fun, the excitement. I worry over the foundation we are laying. Is it sturdy with a few aesthically-pleasing touches or so lopsided and full of cracks that it won't make it to next December? We are not religious people. In fact, I was shocked to hear Sol announce, "Santa Claus must be Jesus' son." Where did he hear about Jesus, and when did the "Christmas Goblin" of his toddler years become Santa Claus? Christmas, for myself, has little to nothing to do with these two characters. It's nostalgia for me. Christmas was always a good time, even the year we had no furniture and slept on the floor. It just always felt "happy." So I hold onto that one. Hanukkah came with my husband, along with a penchant for big, baubly color lights. Kwanzaa I came to on my own in college, and the focus on community and family made it stick. Celebrating the Solstice, well, that just makes sense. That's how we've made sense of it all for ourselves and Luna and Sol. We explain that the sun is so important to so many cultures, so essential for survival, that people have come up with different ways to honor and show respect for this time of year when the days are so short, and we are waiting and hoping for the light to return. We talk about the cycles of nature, and how our own cycles mimic those. As a life-long gardener and nature-explorer, he gets it, and it makes him smile. This makes me smile. (Trivia tidbit: Sol's due date was Dec. 21, the day of the Winter Solstice for that year.) Tonight we'll burn a yule log (interestingly, Luna, my little psychic, has been begging for a fire for about a week), and light the Menorah, and probably watch "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," again, or maybe preview some of those Kwanzaa folktales we bought over at the iTunes store. Peace.