High steppin' for the holidays

To round out the holiday celebrations, I'm offering you, dear readers, two videos plus a few stills that capture a pair of festive events from the North Shore.  Try as I might to develop a theme linking them, I couldn't come up with anything even remotely plausible, so I just hand them to you plain, unadorned as the day they were shot by my inhouse videographer and wife using her Iphone.  (Thanks Trudi!).  This is the first time I've tried to incorporate video into my blog post, I hope it works.

The first presents 13.5 month old Adella on Christmas day, demonstrating her newly acquired skill of walking on two legs.  She has taken to it in a big way, and now that she has begun it's really hard to keep up with her.

The other video records an annual polar bear swim held New Year's day at Fisherman's Beach in Swampscott where we live.  After the video I will also include a few still shots for your enjoyment.  The weather was particularly kind to the polar bears this year, a sunny, almost balmy 49 degrees with little wind, and water temperature well above freezing at 43 degrees.  Trudi and I chickened out this year, our excuse being, we didn't know the local practices.  It turns out that there's very little ceremony attached to it.  You wear your suit under some sweats, don a funny hat, and run into the water yelling at the top of your voice and flailing your arms.  Watch for us next year!

A few stills....

To Drive the Dark Away

This time of year with its short, often gray, muted days and long cold nights can be a challenge to the human spirit.  In response, people throughout history have come up with strategies to overcome their doubts concerning  re-appearance of the light.  We, too, in our new Northern home  have had to confront  this primal uneasiness.

Coming from different religious backgrounds, and as good Unitarians, Trudi and I gladly make use of all the tools available to us, fending off the darkness with both hannukah candles and Christmas tree lights.  This year’s tree came from the Marblehead Boy Scouts.  We bought one of three remaining trees from a load of 150 brought down from Nova Scotia.  We got a good deal on the oddly-shaped tree, which  shed its needles in profuse clouds, but still maintained its lovely scent of spruce forest.

Theater and the participation in ritual performance has long been a bulwark against encroaching dark for us both.  We attended the 41rst annual performance of the Christmas Revels solstice celebration at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre this past week.  One of our first dates - probably the third or fourth performance back in the early ‘70s - was to go to the Cambridge Revels.  Sanders Theatre, opened in 1875 as a monument to Harvard grads who fought for the Union in the Civil War, hasn’t changed over the decades.   It is renowned for its superb acoustics,and beautiful woodwork.  

 

In this year’s version, three fools  sail off in a ship (the Ship of Fools, of course!) to recover the light of the sun, moon, and stars stolen by a sinister skeleton.  The sun is finally revived by a staging of a nativity play by children from the cast.  The moon fool was performed by Mark Jaster, an actor who studied mime under Marcel Marceau and whose career we have followed for many years.  It was a joy to see him again, and to sing along with the sellout audience, the traditional verses of Dona Nobis Pacem and the Sussex Mummers’ Carol.  

On December 22^nd, the winter solstice,  we joined a group of locals at a small park on a bluff overlooking  the Bay in a simple sunrise ceremony to celebrate the return of the sun after the longest night.  Generous donors have funded the construction of a sun circle created by a local artist/architect using basalt columns transported from Washington state.  The dawn was  perfect, cloudless and warm.  We’ll be back at the park in March to mark sunrise on the morning of the Spring equinox, Insha'Allah. 

 

When we first talked about moving back north, we had a  concern about how much darker winters would be from what we had grown used to in Virginia.  Using an internet web site, I found that the difference between Arlington and Swampscott is only 23 minutes of additional darkness on December 22nd for a total of 9 hours and 4 minutes of daylight, which, admittedly, is still a lot of darkness.   However, compared to Fairbanks, Alaska, it’s not such a challenge, as this YouTube video demonstrates.

So, now on Christmas Eve we find daylight in the Northern Hemisphere increasing as we  prepare to sing with the choir at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Lynn in our neighborhood.  We both hope that you, loyal readers, find the light within you to be generous to others and fill the world in the coming year with your creativity and love.