from Chris
Today marks the winter solstice—the shortest day of the year. The earth, tipping on its axis, begins to tip in the other direction. The arc of the sun across the sky is at its lowest, but with the tip, the sun will begin to climb higher and higher again.
Solstice, which comes from Latin, literally means “sun set still.”
For thousands of years, cultures have celebrated the solstice, although no one is quite sure who first noticed it—or even how they noticed it.
But notice it, they do. The belief, say scholars, is that the sun would never return if man did not intervene through some special ceremony or celebration.
Some scholars claim the Mesopotamians were the first to make notice of the solstice. According to Candlegrove.com, the Mesopotamians celebrated a twelve-day festival of renewal to help the god Marduk tame the monster of chaos for one more year.
However, Candlegrove also points out scholarship about Neolithic peoples, who dated back as many as ten-thousand years. They’re the people, for instance, who created Stonehenge, which is calibrated to match up with the sunset on the winter solstice.
Neolithic peoples were the first farmers, whose lives were intimately tied to the seasons and the cycle of harvest. Scholars haven’t yet found proof that these peoples had the skill to pinpoint a celestial event like solstice. Earliest markers of time from these ancient peoples are notches carved into bones, which appear to count the cycles of the moon. But perhaps they watched the movement of the sun as well as the moon, and perhaps they celebrated it—with fertility rites, with fire festivals, with offerings and prayers to their gods and goddesses.
Today, our use of holly, wreaths, evergreen trees, and candles during our holiday celebrations can all be traced back to ancient solstice ceremonies. These symbols represent ongoing life and light.