In the 8th Century it came to pass that the traditional twelve day festivals of the Celts was declared a sacred season by the Church. Emphasis was placed on December 25, January 1, and January 6. December 25 was called “Nollag Mor” by the Celts, “Big Christmas.” January 6 was known as “Nollag Beag,” or “Little Christmas.”

Public work and public business was suspended unless you were a butcher, baker, or someone whose livelihood added to the festivities. Our idea of “Christmas break” stems from this ancient pause in public life.

In these days you’d ponder love, both human and Divine, and would openly practice extravagant acts of charity: gifts to workers who you employed, loved ones near and far, and extra meat and bread to those who struggled throughout the year. In this way you emulated both the Sun who gives without asking, and, as religion gained influence, the Son who was said to do the same.

Because there was no work, people had time to dance and sing. So little caroling bands popped up around town dressed in fun costumes, spreading frivolity and sometimes asking for food or trinkets. We continue this tradition in Christmas caroling.

Everything has an origin, a reason, in this season.

In December the ancient Celts found themselves under the Elder Moon.

Known as Ruish (roo-esh) in Gaelic, the elder tree was known to protect against negative forces, including pests like fruit flies and mosquitos, and so elder was often hung from doorways or in kitchen windows throughout the year. It was also sought out as medicine for so many, and is said to have natural antiviral properties. The elder tree was one you sought when you needed help.

The elder tree is bruised easily, but also regrows quickly, which is why the ancients named this moon at this time of year for this tree. Everything feels fragile right now. But, as the Irish phrase goes, “Every beginning is weak” (bionn gach tosach lag). Fragility allows for birth.

December is about beginnings sprouting from endings. As we head closer and closer to the solstice, the days shorten almost to the point of non-existence (or, at least it feels like that). But the ancients believed that the sun that faded-but-never-abandoned them made a new covenant annually with the earth in these days.

When Christianity began to have an influence and decided to place the celebration of Jesus’ birth in this month at the time of the Yule celebrations, it made so much sense to the Celts that they didn’t bat an eye: a new covenant with the Son/sun was appropriate in these shadow days.

The ancient Celts felt that December was a time for wombing, anyway. The fields were fallow. The family tended to be physically lax but mentally focused. In December they did their “inner-work,” pondering how the shadows of their own being (as Jung would say) helped them live into their full selves.

We’d do well to follow that lead.

And we may find that, at the end of December, we, like the elder tree, find ourselves being birthed differently into a new year after doing the inner work under the Elder Moon.

For the ancient Celts, December was a month where they celebrated light being born from winter’s long shadows.

They believed that, on the solstice, the sun would jump up and retreat back down for just a moment, seemingly staying in roughly the same place, signaling that it would once again keep it’s promise to bless the people with its presence the next year.

Every year they believed the sun was born again.

They’d honor this birth with days and days of celebration, usually around twelve, and they would perform ritual acts of welcome including dancing, drama, music, games of feat, and above all, lighting fires that they thought would help the newly-born, fledgling sun gain strength. The “yule log” was both for heat and for fueling the sun back into its summer glory.

Also, interesting tidbit: “yule” is probably where we get the word “jolly” from in English.

Even after Christianity had overlaid its own festival onto the celebrations of Ireland and Scotland, the pagan roots shone (and shine!) through. The Scandinavian settlements of the area had dyed the yule practices in the proverbial wool of the people.

Lent is a spiritual housecleaning.

Advent? Advent is a spiritual housewarming.

We cozy up our homes, and our hearts, like a young one knitting something in a rocker late into the night, expecting something, someone, any day now.

Any day.

But it starts at night, and in the early morn. As the sun hides in these days and the shadows stick around longer, those who follow the church year ponder beginnings and endings by candle light, slowly adding to their number as the waiting intensifies.

Advent starts in the shadows because most of our waiting happens in the shadows, both literal and figurative, as we wrestle with difficult questions.

What does it mean to be another year older and missing those who have gone before?

What does it mean to wonder when we’ll see our last year?

What does it mean to wait for something new to happen…wondering if it will ever happen at all?

What does it mean to practice joy instead of happiness, peace instead of uneasy stalemates, hope instead of certainty?

What does it mean to be open to something new while missing what was?

This is the way of Advent. These are the angst days of joyful wrestling, prayerful pondering, and hopeful expectancy tinged with a good bit of refining doubt.

Christmas crooners croon away, and that’s all we’ll and good, but the true warbling in these days are the wonderful wonderings we wonder with Mary, pondering what newness lies ahead, and inside of us, this year. We cozy up our beings to welcome it.

Advent starts in the shadows of our “hopes and fears of all the years,” as the carol goes.

A beautiful, amazing, ponderful time. Embrace it.

Tonight as we enter the midway of the month, I’m remembering that in November the ancient Celts found themselves under the Reed Moon.

Each month has a moon, usually named after a tree, corresponding to the attribute that the month brought to the wheel of the year. Now, while reeds are not technically “trees,” November was illumined by the reed moon because reeds, when wound together, created tough blankets that would be used for both floor and roof, for both basket and rope.

They are tough as trees when braided.

Reeds were emblematic of how November was a weaving of worlds, ushered in by Samhain and All Saints, the ancestors and the babies creating a tapestry of existence that was most clearly felt as the shadows lengthened and the hearth blazed. For the ancient Celts life existed far into the past and far into the future, and the cycle of life was always rolling. Reeds reminded them of this: woven together to be one whole, and when wind blew over the open reed they believed they could hear the howling voices of the ancestors calling to them from the other side of the veil.

These, of course, became wind chimes and porch pipes.

The Reed Moon inspires us, with its long night-shine life, to remember those who have gone before, the ache in our bones a reminder of their unseen, but ever-felt, presence.

In these mid-November days, I’m reading about the importance of storytelling in Ireland and Scotland, and how it historically has shaped (and continues to shape) a Celtic worldview.

Stories were seen as so powerful that a storyteller invited into a home was said to bring good luck to the dwelling, and they were often paid well for their stories.

Entertainment. Knowledge. Skill and art. Stories and the tellers of them were seen to impart all of these.

But more than that, storytellers were the “keepers of the people.” They remembered the history and, when they told the story, re-membered those listening into that long thread of history.

It’s a shame that storytelling isn’t practiced much as a profession any longer. It’s one of the things that I love about preaching: it’s a chance to tell a (hopefully) good story.

And also a chance to re-member ourselves to one another around a common tale, if just for a moment.

For the ancient Celts, November was a time of storytelling.

With All Saints and All Souls Day celebrations, with more time inside as the thermometer dropped and the sun became shy, they’d sit around “the lamp of memory” and tell the stories of the family, of the land, of their people, late into the night.

Sometimes you’d hear a knock at your door in the evening around suppertime, and a Shanachie would arrive and barter a story for dinner. These Schanachie (which literally means “old-ones”) where the keepers of the clan stories, and though they weren’t always old, they were in this ancient tradition and held on to the “old lore.”

You still find these people, by the way, not only in Ireland and Scotland, but also in the places around the world where the Celts have roots. Here in the mountains of North Carolina it’s not strange to go into a country store and find someone there willing to tell a tale to a bent ear.

The fact that November is a time of stories in Celtic tradition and a time of Thanksgiving in our American tradition pairs nicely with one another.

Perhaps this Thanksgiving more stories will be heard: stories of the family, of past holidays, of past holy days.

November is a “hinge time” in the life of the world.

The Celts knew this. As the bonfires they used to celebrate All Hallow’s Eve smoldered, they prepared themselves for the encroaching shadows as the sun turned in early.

They hung their herbs in the house to scent the place and prepare for winter meals, and began to bolt their windows against the wind. They’d unpack the candles they had made from the fat of the Fall slaughter, and would begin to do the hard work of nesting in.

They knew that November marked the hinge between Fall and Winter, between light and shadows, between dying and sleep, and they embraced it the way that you embrace that necessary fallow time we all encounter in our lives.

It’s good to realize that some times in our lives will just be fallow. Embrace the rest. Use the reserves. And remember that this time has a beginning and an ending, like all things in life, with rebirth on the far side.

And it feels like a very large hinge time in these days.

“The Facts of Life” by Padraig O Tuama

That you were born
and you will die.
That you will sometimes love enough
and sometimes not.
That you will lie
if only to yourself.
That you will get tired.
That you will learn most from the situations
you did not choose.
That there will be some things that move you
more than you can say.
That you will live
that you must be loved.
That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of
your attention.
That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg
of two people who once were strangers
and may well still be.
That life isn’t fair.
That life is sometimes good
and sometimes better than good.
That life is often not so good.
That life is real
and if you can survive it, well,
survive it well
with love
and art
and meaning given
where meaning’s scarce.
That you will learn to live with regret.
That you will learn to live with respect.
That the structures that constrict you
may not be permanently constraining.
That you will probably be okay.
That you must accept change
before you die
but you will die anyway.
So you might as well live
and you might as well love.
You might as well love.
You might as well love.

Today the church commemorates All Soul’s Day, or “The Day of the Faithfully Departed.”

This festival day is a product of the evolution of the church and its understanding of the departed and how they play into the eschatological and cosmological understanding of all things.

If saints were those who led extraordinary lives, what about the rest of us?

All Souls Day is an answer to that question. Indeed, many people who aren’t technically “saints” in the narrow definition of the term have led wonderfully beautiful and impactful lives. All Souls attempts to honor that fact. It became common practice, for instance, to lift up particular benefactors of parishes on this day, giving a nod to those who made the physical (and spiritual) structures of the faith possible.

In a more pedestrian sense, All Souls Day is, at least for me, a day where we can all embrace the reality that, saint or not, people deserve to be remembered.

In my first parish we had these magnificent stained glass windows put in decades earlier. In them you could see glimpses of not only the artistry of the day, but you could also feel a sort of timelessness that was pervasive, connecting those who had first stared into and through those windows with me and my own children who looked at them now.

Good art does that: it creates connective tissue between the past and the ever-expanding future.

But All Souls Day is a reminder that good theology does that, too. We stand upon the beliefs of the past, hauling some of them with us, and leaving some on the path behind us as signs and markers of thoughts discarded and avenues that were dead-ends.

All Souls Day lifts up the very practical, very pious, and very pedestrian people on whose shoulders we stand. In this way it is even more meaningful than the pomp and circumstance of All Saints Day.

If All Saints Day is the fine-dining establishment in your city, All Souls Day is the little cafe you frequent where you know the owner, have a favorite booth, and don’t need to glance at the menu because you know it by heart.

In other words, All Souls Day is really where most of us will find ourselves: in the ordinary annals of a life that tried its best, did some great things, fell short quite a bit, but is remembered by a small, but faithful, group of loved ones who know our names.