Do they celebrate holidays on Rana Station? Of course they do! Personally, I think holidays are not only some of the most fun and interesting things religions or other types of communities do. Despite all the stresses and upheavals we hear so much about, holidays fulfill basic human needs. The reasons for the seasons Even sober, serious, hard-working adults need to play, once in a while. We need to break the routine. To relax with friends or family. To do…
We’re back at the nadir of the year (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), and looking for a few small bright spots. This year, especially, those can be hard to find. Relative lacks of urgency from certain Senators notwithstanding, this winter will be a very deep nadir indeed. People are out of work. People are hungry. They can’t pay their rent, and a national moratorium on evictions ends soon. Death tolls from Covid-19 have surged higher than a 9/11 every…
December is a month of holidays. For several years, I’ve labored to create blog posts about the holidays that fall during this month. When I realized I was focusing exclusively on December holidays but no others, I started my “Holidays Project” last summer. At this point I’ve done feature posts on nearly every major religious holiday that usually falls in December, as well as several more minor ones and at least two that are secular in nature. Why so many holidays in one month? Blame it on the…
The Artdog Image of Interest Do you love time lapse photography? I certainly do. I went looking for a good image to wish you a magical Summer Solstice, for this post. When I stumbled across a time lapse image of the sun rising at Stonehenge on the Summer Solstice, I was delighted. I hope you are, too! This sequence was taken at Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, UK, in 2018. Just watching the video made me feel a little bit the way I did after the…
We all have our own way of confronting (or trying to hide from) the Holidays. It’s not ONLY Christmas, of course–although both secular and sacred Christmas imagery and messaging seem to be everywhere in my Kansas City environment. From Festivus to Kwanzaa, from Hanukkah to Winter Solstice celebrations to Yule, there seems to be a holiday for everybody at this time of year. Whatever holidays you celebrate, how’s it going? We’re at the mid-point of December. Are you ready? Perhaps you’re one of those organized, super-prepared people, who’ve been buying a building stockpile of presents since last January….
It’s the nadir of the year. The longest night, the shortest day. What’re you gonna do? What else? Have a party! That’s apparently been the Winter Solstice solution of choice for cultures all over the Northern Hemisphere since at least Neolithic times. The famous triple-spiral design incised inside the Newgrange tomb, popularly thought to be Celtic, actually predates the Celts by several thousand years. It bears a striking resemblance to sun symbols seen elsewhere in northern Europe. The opening of the…