Christmas is fast approaching and it feels more festive here every day with the arrival of snow and Josiah, but more on that later. There was a lot of activity at our house last week. Lots of gift wrapping and music making and other things. On Monday I finally transferred my batch of apple cider vinegar from the big vat into gallon jugs. I started that vinegar back in the first week of October from this year’s cider. It took nine weeks for it to ferment and settle. I love my homemade vinegar. It’s mellower, more apple-ly than store vinegar and it isn’t pasteurized so it still has live mother in it. I ended up with three gallons of vinegar plus a quart of mother culture to save for next year. It was snowing a little that day and it was nice to reflect back to apple time as I worked and watched the flurries.
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Bottling vinegar.
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The end product.
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All week long Miriam and Hannah have been baking batches of our traditional Christmas cookies – frosted orange cookies, lebkuchen, ginger cookies, Greek anise cookies, chocolate peppermint cookies, and Bombard cookies*. I did a bit of baking too – a fruitcake. I know that fruitcakes have a bad reputation for some reason and are the butt of many holiday jokes (that expression has an interesting origin going back at least to the 16th century and has to do with a butt being a straw target used in archery), but I have always loved a good fruitcake. They have to be spicy, heavy, moist, and full of nuts and candied fruit and they are better if they have a week or more to age before you eat them. Mmm, delicious! Miriam baked over 20 loaves of sourdough bread to give as gifts. There will be more baking this week as the Big Day draws near.
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Bombard cookies.
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*We call them Bombard cookies in honor of Aunt Helen Bombard Young (1931-2015), Uncle Dick Young’s wife. She introduced us to them on one of her famous Christmas cookie plates many years ago. They are made by spreading peanut butter between two Ritz crackers and then dipping them in melted chocolate and adding sprinkles. They are one of our favorite cookies.
We had a winter storm midweek. The warnings started to come on Monday. The amount of snow predicted rose each day from one to two inches and then six to ten inches. Wednesday morning we had the proverbial and surprisingly accurate “Red sky in the morning.” The snow started to fall at noon that day and kept on falling through the night. On Thursday we awoke to sixteen inches of it. School was canceled. I went out just before sunrise to inspect the world and found it gorgeously beautiful. It looked the way December is supposed to look. The PennDOT plows had already cleared the highway and township plows had cleared our road. I walked down to the beaver pond and then came home and began shoveling. I shoveled a path from the back porch to the road, from the road to the upper door of the barn, and from the road to the lower coop door. I use the road as my main route when there is so much snow. It’s easier to walk on the plowed road than it is to trudge across the yard. In the evening Hannah and I went out and shoveled some more. We cleared more of our driveway and the Shilligs. Shoveling is pretty intense exercise. The next day we were both pretty sore. We have some fantastic icicles hanging from the eaves. I hope the snow stays past Christmas with a bit of refreshing. It is really beautiful.
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The red sky before the storm.
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The morning after the storm.
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Walking down to the barn on the road.
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Down on the highway at dawn.
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The beaver pond.
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The back porch before digging out.
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The path.
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Digging out.
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Walking up the road.
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| Sunrise. |
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| Icicles. |
We are now in the darkest days of the year. The Winter Solstice is tomorrow. The sun won’t rise until 7:30 a.m. and will set around 4:30 p.m. That means there will only be about nine hours of daylight. When you consider that at the Summer Solstice we have fifteen hours of daylight and a twilight that lingers even longer, that contrast is impressive. I love that in these dark days, when the sun is weakest and the world is cold, we celebrate with light. Hanukkah, the festival of lights, began on the 10th and ended on the 18th. We don’t really observe Hanukkah at our house. We have several menorahs that we sometimes light and we sing Hanukkah songs and play dreidel and have latkes for dinner. We didn’t do that during the seven days and eight nights this time, but we’re having latkes for lunch today.
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One of our menorahs.
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Another menorah.
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And another.
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We also celebrate Christmas with lights. We decorate our houses with strings of lights. We bring evergreen trees into our homes and deck them with lights. We light Advent candles. We know that Christ was not born on December 25th or any time during the winter. He was born in the spring when the earth was freshening and shepherds were out keeping watch over their flocks during lambing time. Observing his birth near the solstice didn’t begin until around 350 A.D. when Pope Julius I declared December 25th the official observance of the Feast of the Nativity. He chose that date for reasons having to do with previously existing pagan celebrations from various cultures that he wanted to transform into a Christian festival. Although it isn’t really Jesus’ birthday, it is a very symbolically appropriate time to celebrate the birth of the Son of God, the Light and Life of the World, who would banish the darkness of death and redeem mankind from the Fall.
The scriptures are full of references to light. The Old Testament mentions it 180 times, the New Testament - 81, the Book of Mormon - 84, the Doctrine and Covenants - 75, and the Pearl of Great Price - 36.
Isaiah, speaking prophetically 800 years before Christ’s birth wrote, “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.” (Isaiah 60:1-3)
In the New Testament, John records, “Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” (John 8:12)
In the Doctrine and Covenants the Lord proclaims, “. . . I am the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” And tells us that He is “The light and the Redeemer of the world; the Spirit of truth, who came into the world, because the world was made by him, and in him was the life of men and the light of men.” (D&C 93:2, 9) And also that “. . . the word of the Lord is truth, and whatsoever is truth is light, and whatsoever is light is Spirit, even the Spirit of Jesus Christ. And the Spirit giveth light to every man that cometh into the world; and the Spirit enlighteneth every man through the world, that hearkeneth to the voice of the Spirit.” (D&C 84:45-46)
I love light. I know from experience that light is life. It means the difference between bleak December and lush June. Truth is light. Deception, evil, and error cannot abide light – light reveals them for what they are. So at the turning of the year, when the darkest day passes and the light begins to grow again, it is completely appropriate to celebrate the birth of the Light and Life of the World.
And this year on the solstice there will be additional signs in the heavens – more light shining in the darkness. Tomorrow night for the first time since just before dawn on March 4, 1226, the planets Jupiter and Saturn will be in alignment and appear as one star. Alignments between these two planets are rather rare, occurring once every 20 years or so but they rarely appear so close from Earth as they will on December 21st. The planets will appear low in the western sky for about an hour after sunset. Another conjunction like this won’t happen again until March 15, 2080. It’s supposed be cloudy and snowy here tomorrow night, so we probably won’t get to see it.
Yesterday Josiah arrived home from college. He flew into Buffalo late, 10:50. Stacey, Hannah and I drove up to pick him up. We went a little early so we could take Hannah to see Niagara Falls. Although she’d been there before when she was small, she couldn’t remember ever seeing them. The paths near the falls were all closed, so we couldn’t get very close to them, but we could see all the decorative lights across the river on the Canadian side. From there we did a little shopping, treated ourselves to dinner at Chic-fil-A, and then headed to the airport. Josiah’s flight came in on time and we picked him up and headed home. We got home at 1:15 a.m.
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At Niagara Falls.
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At the falls.
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We aren’t used to being up late, so we were dragging a bit this morning. Today is Christmas Sunday and we had our Christmas Program at church. Our Branch President and his counselor read scriptures about the birth of the Savior and in between we listened to carols. I was in charge of selecting the music and since we are not allowed to sing, I chose recordings of the Tabernacle Choir to listen to. It turned out pretty nice. After church, we sang carols in the car the whole way home and then stopped by to carol for our neighbor down the road.
Now dinner preparations are underway. We are late for Hanukkah, but the latkes are frying and smell wonderful. Maybe we’ll play dreidel later, after a good winter’s nap to catch up after being out so late last night.
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Merry Christmas from the Howe family!
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I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas!
