Friday, The Second Day in the Octave of Christmas

The Octave of Christmas begins on Christmas Day and continues for eight days. We are in the "re" today, as in Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do. It is the Feast of St. Stephen. It is a full step above the Do, musically speaking. This is the Ionian mode. When you look at a piano you see within one octave, say from C to C, you see eight white keys and five black ones. But when you play a tune like "Mary Had A Little Lamb" or "Desperado", you don't really use all 12 of these keys in the tune. You use the ones that are part of the Do Re Mi. In the key of C, that would be all of the white notes. No black notes.

But interestingly, even though they are all white keys, the difference between each of them is not equal. They are not all whole steps. There are two half steps in the Ionian mode. They are between the third and fourth interval, and the seventh and eighth interval. See? These are the two places where there is no black key in between. But the note next to the C, the first note, is a whole step away. And that is where we are today.

That feels right to me. Today feels like Not Christmas. We have passed through a new beginning day and now we are moving ahead.

In terms of the solstice, Christmas is not Day One, although it is closer to it than January 1, New Year's Day. The actual Day One is around the 20th of December. It is the Winter Solstice. Christmas and Hannukah are very near the winter solstice every year. Christmas roughly coincides with the pagan celebrations that celebrate the return of the light. And the Winter Solstice is the day in our annual cycle that the days, which have been growing shorter since June, start to get longer again. Now the light grows stronger again. Each day it increases until it reaches the midpoint again at the end of June, the Summer Solstice, when it decreases again until the Winter Solstice. It is a circle. Or perhaps a spiral.  Or a series of octaves.

We would then be in the bottom of the circle now, and we are on the way up. Longer days, shorter nights. So at Christmas, we celebrate light. We hang lights, we light candles, we basically light up everything we can get our hands on, because we are glad to have the light return. Because we may love the darkness but if we do, we love it for its respite. If we knew that light was not coming back, we would surely not love it.

So in the Ionian mode of the Octave of Christmas, in the "Re" day, the Feast of St. Stephen, during the beginning of the time after the Winter Solstice when light is returning, I pray that the light will shine very bright. This has been a year with a lot of darkness which seems to have gotten deeper and stronger than ever. Our world has seen so much suffering and hatred, which I equate to the lack of light. So in praying for light, I pray for clarity and guidance and the ability to see that which is love and that which isn't, and to simply choose love. Choose life. Choose light.