The Light's Return

Reverse syncretism, and an alternative to the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

Growing up in the Northeast, the Currier & Ives version of Christmas was always an easy sell: snow-capped evergreens, the bustle and bundle of holiday shoppers, warming up with hot chocolate after getting home from the “U-CUT XMAS TREE” farm up the road.

I had it pretty good. My dad’s job afforded our family enough time to visit both sets of grandparents on the weekends around Christmas, driving the icy interstates from one corner of upstate New York to the other. Christmas was a succession of gifts and family meals in three different households. We didn’t have a huge family—no cousins close to my age—so most of the presents under the tree at each stop were for me and my brother.

Meanwhile, my wife managed to have an even more postcard-worthy Christmas than I did: packing into her grandparents’ old farmhouse out in the snowy countryside with her army of cousins. They rigged up an extended dining table that spanned two rooms, sang carols in front of the fireplace, and slept shoulder to shoulder across the floors until it was time to open presents in the morning.

The bar was set pretty high. But of course, it couldn’t last forever.

People grow up. Grandparents pass away. Climate change dealt a major blow to our version of Christmas, at least in my recollection: when I was little, it seemed like there was always a foot or more of snow wherever we went, all through December, just like in the holiday specials on TV. I can’t remember the last time we had more than a fleeting few inches at Christmastime.

The past couple years have been especially rough, with my dad gone. We managed to eke out a few harried Christmases after the kids were born—first one new baby, then COVID, then another new baby—but never really got to have a fully normal holiday with all of us together. And now we never will.

The magic fades as we get older. We’re contending with scattered families, losing people, fewer presents under the tree. The view outside the window doesn’t look much like the marshmallow world in the winter that Dean Martin’s ghost just will not stop singing about.

And I think about the people who never had what we had, or have even less than what we have now. The people who have to work straight through the holidays, or have difficult family circumstances. Even just people like me who occasionally suffer from seasonal depression¹ and can’t always summon up the holiday spirit. For those people—the relentless, jaw-clenching, sugar-glittery megawatt cheerfulness of our culture’s idealized Christmas is exhausting.

If you can’t have a Hallmark-worthy Christmas, what else is there to celebrate?

Christmas is still a brilliant bit of pagan syncretism even without the snow and the tree and the presents. It can work for anybody in the Northern hemisphere—and I’m not talking about the old “Christmas is actually Saturnalia” gimmick.

Christmas is when we celebrate the promised return of the Light. Crucially, it’s not when the light actually returns: there are still plenty of dark, cold months ahead, before Spring comes and the ground thaws. But by December 25th, we’re already past the Winter solstice, and the days are getting steadily longer, albeit imperceptibly at first.

In choosing December 25th for the religious observance of Christ’s birth, somebody (Emperor Constantine, I guess?) must have had a sharp eye for symbolism, beyond just the expediency of pushing out an old pagan celebration with a new Christian one. For Christians, Jesus represents the Light—the return of hope to the world. The Light didn’t return in its full strength until much later: Jesus first had to reach adulthood in order to carry out his ministry. At his birth, he was still a potentiality—an infant in a barn, in precarious circumstances, hidden in the darkness. But the Light was there. The promise had been made.

I’m not a Christian myself. (At least not the ordinary kind.) But just from a mythic perspective—I like the symbolism of that story, and how it reinforces the feeling of the season. If you look at it the right way, it’s the rare Christian holiday that enhances the more universal pagan symbolism of the land and the seasons, instead of obscuring it. Even if you don’t believe that Jesus is the Light, you can still believe in the Light, in the darkest days of winter. The Light might not be back yet. There are still many dark days ahead. But it’s a promise that will be fulfilled: the Light is already returning, growing stronger, even if we can’t see it yet. And for those of us who don’t already celebrate Sol Invictus or full-on Yule, but still live in a Christian-inflected culture—that reverse syncretism is a good way to ease back into the old pagan cycles.

That’s still worth celebrating when the dark days of December seem particularly bleak. That’s what I plan to share with my kids. Why do we observe a Christian holiday if we’re not Christian? Why do we celebrate some idealized candy confection of a picture-perfect winter wonderland, when there’s nothing but frozen mud in the backyard? We don’t, necessarily. We celebrate the promise of the Light’s return.

It can also be about all that other ambitious stuff: Peace on Earth, perfect gifts, belting out carols like Mariah Carey.

Or it can just be a quiet celebration of hope.

That’s what I’m lighting a candle for this season.

Stay safe out there, everybody. Have the merriest Christmas you can. And if you just can’t manage it this year—keep holding on. The Light is already returning, even if it doesn’t seem like it yet.

1. For myself, I think of it as “celebrating my Slavic heritage,” rather than having an actual psychological disorder.