In the week before Christmas, even the world seems weary of itself. Daylight is weak, nights press closer, festive pressures build. Desperate times call for familiar rituals: spending too much, eating too much, doing too much -- and complaining about it all.
Yet some people are resisting. They are creating rewarding traditions.
They are finding light in the darkness, embracing the wheel of the seasons and the heavens' covenant with the earth. They are marking the winter solstice, the year's longest night and shortest day, 9 1/2 hours. When it occurs at 3: 07 p.m. tomorrow, the solstice will usher in winter and the promise of spring.
"There's something very profound about this time of year," says Jessica Dibb, director of the Inspiration Community, a nonprofit spiritual studies group in Owings Mills that will hold a solstice ceremony tonight, one of at least two in the Baltimore area this weekend. "The solstice comes at a time when many religions are giving thanks and celebrating the occurrence of miracles. You have to think there's some kind of resonance we're all feeling for such different cultures to end up celebrating something sacred."
The winter solstice coincides with Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. It also shares the calendar with Divali, the Hindu Festival of Light, and Soyal, the traditional solstice ceremony of the Hopi Indians.
At the winter solstice, the Earth's tilt angles the Northern Hemisphere away from the sun, causing the shortest day. The word solstice literally means "sun stands still" -- which it does for a few days. By Dec. 27, however, Baltimore will have an extra minute of daylight.
The solstice "comes from the fact that the Earth is tipped 23 1/2 degrees and that the earth goes around the sun," says astronomer Richard Henry, director of the Maryland Space Grant Consortium. But to him, the vastness of the universe is a mystery worth pondering while the solstice is a matter of geometry.
Dibb notes that in primitive times there was no greater miracle than the return of the sun. "Somehow we all picked up on this desire to feel connected to a greater good but still connect to miracles: In Hanukkah, the light kept burning for eight days on only a day of oil. In Christmas, there was the birth of Jesus. The return of the Hopis' kachina gods. King Arthur was said to be born on the winter solstice. The I Ching [an ancient Chinese text prized for divination and wisdom] celebrates this time as the point of the return of the light."
