I love this entire season, and all the different ways different peoples celebrate it! So I usually commemorate them all, one way or the other. And St. Nicholas and St. Lucia’s Days, plus Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve and Day, plus Epiphany.
Isn’t it great that so many cultures celebrate the tipping point of the light – when the days are the very shortest, and then, a few seconds at a time, begin to get longer again. Tomorrow the 19th, for instance, will be 10 seconds shorter than today. And then about 3 days after the Solstice on Monday the 21st, the days will be begin to lengthen by a few seconds. The increasingly longer days are really noticeable by mid-January.
All the Christmas lights and candles, all the celebrations, all the wonderfully nice folk in the streets, the smell of baking bread throughout my house….. I’m grateful for all those good reasons for the season!