Tonight, I turned on the holiday lights and set up my little Winter Solstice ritual of keeping candles and oil lamps going through the night, to guide back the sun.
Back in January 2017, I started another holiday tradition of leaving my lights on through Imbolc (which I’ve always taken as February 2, Candlemas and Groundhog Day, though many folks take it as February 1). It was the immediate aftermath of my mother’s medical crisis , and the start of the first Trump administration, and it seemed like we could use a little more light. I’ve kept that habit, trying to reinforce the notion that the year remains new until Imbloc , that we can keep that “new start” energy for several weeks after the calendar flips over.
Then in 2023, on the day after Imbloc, before I had turned off those lights, my brother died. I kept them on even longer that year.
One thing about living is that if you do it long enough, every day of the calendar gains weighty personal associations. Christmas is also the day my grandfather died. September 25th is the day my mother almost died. September 18th is the day my father died. This past year, now that I find myself in a new romantic relationship, is fraught with potential anniversaries, day of meeting, first date, et cetera, that may be weighty in my life for years to come.
But this intersection of a ritual with a death creates a new function of the ritual.
The lighting of the holiday lights has become a memorial to Jim. A light burning through the dark of the year, not only to guide back the sun, but to light my brother’s way through the hell realms like the cintamani jewel carried by the great Bodhisattva Jizo, protector of all who travel the six realms of existence, whose staff pries open the gates of hell and whose magical jewel lights the way. It takes only a little light, a single candle transforms the dark. (Or, “it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness”, as someone, perhaps Terry Pratchett, once observed.)
When I flipped the switch to join my neighbors in holiday festivities, but leave them going longer than most, no one else will know the ritual semantics, what it means to me. But perhaps most magic, or at least the most useful magic, is like this: full of personal coding and import.
Blessed Yule to all and Namu Jizo Bosatsu.
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