My favorite thing about Christmas is the lights. Winter always seems like such a dark time of year, so it's nice to see strings of lights glittering on houses and trees. When I lived in Logan I would eagerly wait for them to put up the lights on main street. They did it the lazy way, with strands of lights looped around the outside of the tree instead of the painstaking individual branches. So when you drove by it was like a swirling, dynamic light sculpture.
I remember driving to my Grandparents house in Fountain Hills, AZ and looking at the hundreds of luminaries that dotted the roads. It's one of my favorite memories. With few trees to decorate, they found a way to add more light to their town as well. This year I decided to adopt the tradition. So, I lined our walkway with white paper bags filled with sand and lit by a single candle. Luminaries are so classic, so simple, a variation on one of the symbols of Christ, the Light of the World.
Today is the shortest day of the year, the Winter Solstice. The sun is the furthest away from the earth that it will ever be, and so, it seems fitting that on these cold, dark days, that we celebrate light. The ancients watched the heavens more then the average person does today, and so they had a holiday called natalis solis invicti, the Roman "birth of the unconquered sun". It just so happens that it's on December 25th. Happy Holy-days.
