Extollagy!

And so it draws to a close, as day follows night and the planet hurtles around its satellite star. The great hibernation in the last month of the year, as the cars vanish from the roads and the emails disappear from the inbox and everything goes silent or refocuses on an orgy of purchase, fridges and larders overflowing as if we will never see another harvest. We cut down living trees, put them in our homes, and cover them with lights. We sing with unfamiliar communality, uncomfortably worshipping things we do not know. And then, for a day, the still, intense feast-ival and holy-day for which we have all been preparing.

The food is good, and part of it. The presents, too. The preparation – chopping, wrapping, stirring – part of the silent ritual enchantment of such prosaic, crowd-pleasing pleasures. But what gives such simple things bottom is twofold. The underlying keying-in with the brute, blind, conquering force of nature, the shortening of the days, the spinning of the planet. This Solsticial binding is the bass. But just above that sits a low, silent melody equally significant, historically younger, and harder to define, unless one is capable of understanding these things literally, which I’m not (and in any case to do so always seems to me to turn the baby out with the bathwater, or the manger). An idea about a human birth: blood and groaning in a cold barn; a shocked and confused mother, strange visitors. An idea about a humanity that is also a divinity, even *the* divinity. A birth that has its death bound into it like holly is with ivy. An idea that unites us all, because this is also all of us. For a long 24 hours, the darkness is held back, and the promise of a light to come remade, and we are all together. As much of the world seems to be getting darker, this is a good thing.

And then it all starts, as slowly and as inexorably as time, to unwind again. A week’s dusky prefigurements, and late nights and boxsets and too much drink, and the overlapping rival poetries unravel, Janus turns in one direction, the cars spew out their carbon on the motorway and the servers of north European Christendom begin to groan with the weight of busy-ness. Was it worth it? It was.