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| Photo taken of the sunrise on top of Haleakala at an elevation of 10,023 feet. |
The following article from Hugh Nibley, written more
than half a century ago, is a timely reminder of the importance of this time of year. This article originally appeared in Millennial Star 112/1 (January 1950), 4-5.
Long before the Christian Church was ever heard
of, people throughout the world celebrated one great festival that far
overshadowed all other social activities in importance. That was the
great Year Rite, the celebration of the creation of the world and the
dramatization of a plan for overcoming the bondage of death. It took
place at the turn of the year when the sun, having reached its lowest
point on the meridian, was found on a joyful day to be miraculously
mounting again in its course; it was a day of promise and reassurance,
heralding a new creation and a new age. Everywhere the great year
festival was regarded as the birthday of the whole human race and was a
time of divination and prophecy, marked by a feast of abundance in which
all gave and received gifts as an earnest hope of good things to come.
There is plenty of evidence in the early Christian writings that Christ was born not at the solstice but in the spring, early
in April. Much has been written on the shifting of his birthday celebration to
make it coincide with the day of Sol Invictus, a late Romanized version
of an oriental midwinter rite. In other parts of the world, people had no difficulty identifying the
Lord’s birthday with the greatest of popular festivals. When Pope
Zacharias rebuked the Germans on the Rhine for their pagan festival at
midwinter, Boniface could answer him back, that if he objected to
heathen feasts and games, all he had to do was look around him at Rome,
where he would see the same feasting, drinking, and games on the same
ancient holy days to celebrate the same blessed event—he was referring,
of course, to the Saturnalia, the great prehistoric festival of the
Romans. Our own Yule, carols, lights, greenery, gifts, and games are
evidence enough that a northern Christmas is no importation from the
East in Christian times but something far older.
Now, there is no law of the mind that requires all men everywhere to
put just one peculiar interpretation on the descent and return of the
sun in its course. This complex and specialized festival, which follows
so closely the same elaborate pattern in Babylonia, Egypt, Iceland, and
Rome, is now recognized to be no spontaneous invention of untutored
minds but the remnant of a single tradition ultimately traceable to one
common lost source. The essential feature of this great world
[Page 69]festival
everywhere is that it aims, if but for a few short days, to recapture
the freedom, love, equality, abundance, joy, and light of a Golden Age, a
dimly remembered but blessed time in the beginning when all creatures
lived together in innocence without fear or enmity, when the heavens
poured forth ceaseless bounty, and all men were brothers under the
loving rule of the King and Creator of all. Is it at all surprising that
the Christian world’s celebration of the Savior’s birth should fall
easily and naturally into the pattern of the older rites? In the end
they are really the same thing—both are recollections of forgotten
dispensations of the Gospel; both are attempts to recall an age of lost
innocence and lost blessings.
Lost? Who can doubt it? There is a nostalgic sadness about Christmas,
as there is about the Middle Ages, with their everlasting quest of
something that has been lost. Christmas is a small light in a great
darkness; it is evidence of things not seen. It is not the real thing
but the expression of a wish, for like the great year rites of the
ancients, it merely dramatizes what once was and what men feel they can
still hope for. A brief, brave show of generosity and cheer is our
assurance that earth can be fair, and we gladly join with all mankind in
the gesture. In so doing we would remind the world that Christmas is
both a demonstration of man’s capacity for enjoying good and sharing it
and of his helplessness to supply it from his own resources. The great
blessings we seek at Christmas are not of our own making (the everyday
world is our handiwork) but must come from another world, even as Father
Christmas comes to the children as a visitor from afar. The painful
fact that Christmas has an end and “all things return to their former
state” is an adequate commentary on the actual state of things. The
world,
[Page 70]which denies revelation,
once a year has a moment of lucidity in which men are permitted to
hope; then it returns to its old disastrous routine—but because of
Christmas that routine can never be the same. For men have allowed
themselves to be caught off guard, for a brief moment they have let down
the barriers and shown where their hearts really lie; Scrooge the man
of business can never go back again after his Christmas fling—however
ashamed he may be of it in the cold light of day, it is too late to deny
that he has shown Scrooge the man of the world to be but a mask and an
illusion.
So the Latter-day Saints have always been the greatest advocates of
the Christmas spirit; nay, they have shocked and alarmed the world by
insisting on recognizing as a real power, what the world prefers to
regard as a pretty sentiment. Where the seasonal and formal aspect of
Christmas is everything, it becomes a hollow mockery. If men really want
what they say they do, we have it, but faced with accepting a real
Savior who has really spoken with men, they draw back, nervous and ill
at ease. In the end lights, tinsel, and sentimentality are safer, but a
sense of possibilities still rankles, so to that we shall continue to
appeal. For by celebrating Christmas the world serves notice that it is
still looking for the Gospel.
Sidenote:
Today is
Friday, December 21, 2018 and at 3:23 pm MST will mark the winter solstice.
This solstice is particularly special this year as the upcoming
December full moon, named the Cold Moon, will be visible in the night
sky along with the Ursid meteor shower.
Addendum:
Photo from the early morning hike of the first sunrise after the Winter Solstice.
