Hot Masthead, Cool Makeover

Check out this hot, cool new look! This boomin’ corner of cyberspace just got a glamour treatment by Pop Art Diva! Thanks, Terri, for this fabulous and colorful transformation for Hottie/Cool. She’s becoming quite a blog babe!

I had a neat experience recently with Kayla, the teenager and budding author I mentor. Kayla had brought her protagonist into a unique setting in her novel, just in passing. Until we started brainstorming, Kayla didn’t realize this unusual place had a real purpose and potential for furthering her story in a most hilarious way. We had a discussion about the right and left brain—how our creative right brains often give us a bits of information or ideas. Then it’s up to our left brains and analytical skills to figure out what we’re supposed to do with them.

That’s how Mini Me—Joyce at Three—got to be prominent on this blog and in my new masthead. When I discovered this photo in an album some years ago, I knew instantly that it was "the" picture of my inner child. The round, Jester motif picture frame was pure synchronicity—something I found in a unique shop on a business trip to Minneapolis. It took a long time before I realized that Joyce Jr. belonged in it.

Everyone should have a picture of his or her inner child where s/he can see it often. Mini You is the source of your inspiration, playfulness, and the beginnings of your lifelong process of learning by trial and error. Little You lived out loud and was full of wonder! This aspect of ourselves is what makes cool later living possible. If your childhood was troublesome and lacking in this aspect, let Big You nurture Little You and remember the wise words of novelist Tom Robbins: “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

It took many things adding up cumulatively before I realized: my intuition to have Mini Me in my blog masthead represents an important aspect of blowing up the old Old. Stomp your foot and refuse to be a fuddy duddy!

Then there is the fact that we are called “baby” boomers. That surge of post-war fertility that we were born of packs a lot of symbolic whammy. We are a generation that is fertile with imagination and creativity. Our population swell is swellest of all as our collective wisdom permeates the general population all at once. In the same way, our sheer numbers, as children, changed how society coped with most everything from child rearing to education and housing.

This year at Winter Solstice, the Magical Child was the theme of our Solsisters celebration. I shared this photo, and everyone caught the concept instantly and planned to go home and find the picture of her Inner Child. I invited everyone to bring it to next year’s celebration.

Young me and Older Me have a constant intuitive dialogue that Terri has captured as an electric, psychic bond joining past and present. There is that well-known addage--heavy, but at one level highly truthful, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Remembering the best of our childhood past is no condemnation—why the TV show Happy Days was so popular. Or if we’re condemned to laughter, joy, wide-eyed curiosity, and high energy from here on out, give me a life sentence.

Boomer Tube Babies

I’ll start this post with a poem I wrote circa 1973, a homage to the role that early TV played in my life. Within it, I’ve included links to many wonderful “blast from the past” programs. Enjoy exploring them after reading this ditty:

Test Tube Baby

Tom Terrific
Mighty Manfred Wonderdog
everfaithful companion
Crabby Appleton
Ding Dong School bells
Pinky Lee and Mean Old Mister Tooth Decay

Eyeball to eyeball
small screen tube
Uncle Bucky, Uncle Ned
and me.

Rootie Kazootie was full of zip and joy.
I was full of wit
An early TV whiz kid
Ah, Kid,
you haven’t changed a bit.


Head Trip
Few people today consider TV to be a place where a kid could sharpen her wits. The baby years of television did that for me—and more!

My mother loved to tell this story about my turn-on and turning point when it came to television. I was only a year old, and my parents—perennial gadget junkies—were flipping through the four channels Chicago had to offer in 1949 on their 10-inch black-and-white television. Leave it to them to be the first couple on the block to buy one of those new-fangled boxes. Howdy Doody caught my eye (or “How Do Ya Doody,” as my mom used to call him). I got so excited; I stood on my head!

Television has been standing me on my head ever since.

TV was my teacher, my artistic muse, my playmate, my babysitter, and my Joy in a Box. I learned to color with Miss Frances and on another show, I used one of those nifty pieces of film plastic you put on the screen, turning your B&W into a rainbow gallery thanks to a kid with crayons. In those days before color and sophisticated special effects, dragons like Ollie, of Kukla and Fran, piqued my curiosity about the real thing. While my mom was perennially busy being Mrs. Cunningham from Happy Days—baking, coffee klatching, cleaning, and home-making as a true profession—I was off getting my little brain in gear and my creativity tested when I wasn’t doing it running around our double lot property, raising Cain and clouds of dirt. I was the oldest kid in the neighborhood. I got bored quickly with kids considerably younger than me. TV offered cool adults—much more interesting than my parents!—and kids of all ages.

Radio Kids and Boob Tube Babies
It wasn’t until I married my first husband in the ‘70s that I realized how baby boomers might be unique as the first boob tube babies. My ex, born six years before me, came from the era of radio. He regaled me with stories of his favorite shows, and I bought him cassette reproductions of many of the classics as gifts: George Burns & Gracie Allen, The Shadow, Fibber McGee and Molly.

Laramie claimed that being raised on radio gave him a fertile imagination, unlike the TV generation behind him. He had to imagine it all with no visual cues. We boomers were handed our images on a silver platter. TV was my pabulum. His theory sounded good, but if it were true, why did I grow up so creative?

I went through a long period in my thirties where I thought I was too good for TV or TV wasn’t good enough for me—something like that. It was all crap, as far as I was concerned, a time when the expression “boob tube” hit home for me. There was nothing good on TV, and I preferred to read books, go to lectures, and chase after all the wrong men.

What has TV meant to you over the course of your life? What is your relationship with your TV shows and characters?

My husband Tim is constantly amused by how emotional and involved I get with the characters in the shows I love. They are my family. I mourn when they die or otherwise move on, and I swear at the writers who send them to questionable fates—or worse, yet, leave me between seasons on a cliffhanger.

While I suspect there are differences worth exploring between Radio Kids and Boob Tube Babies, I’m most fascinated by the theory of Steven D. Stark in his book, “Glued to the Set: The 60 Television Shows That Made Us Who We Are Today.” Stark believes that in a country as diverse as the United States, TV has created common reference points and a shared culture. His book covers the TV events he feels most shaped us into the nation we are today. This idea captivates me, because communication and connection are near the top of my personal needs hierarchy, as well as a sense of belonging. TV covers them all.

Stark also admonishes us not to throw the boob tube baby out with the bath water. In its diversity, television has it all—the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in-between. Boomers are the test tube babies, because we were the first to splash in this TV pool of shared culture. Obviously, since Stark and others have written whole books on the topic, I am only scratching the surface of what it means to be have been on the forefront of this cultural melting pot. For example, Stark believes the real import of my beloved Howdy Doody was the opportunity to expand children’s marketing. Older boomers (born in the late 1940s) have been bombarded with advertising images, some of us nearly from Day 1 of our little lives.

You, Me and Mr. T.
Nope, I don’t mean the guy with the Mohawk and gold chains, but our relationship with Mr. Television Himself. If you’ve got 10 minutes, let’s do a self-discovery exercise. Give yourself a 5-minute limit for the first two bullets. Open up a computer file or grab some paper (or print this out and do it later). Don’t think too hard. Write from the top of your head:

* Name your top 5 favorite TV shows of all time.
* Name your top 5 most memorable commercials.

Now take another 5 minutes and make a header for each show or commercial. Write:

* Why did you love this show or commercial?
* Why do you think you remember it or it speaks to you from the past?
* What might each show’s prominence in memory say about you?

I hope this post sparks some dialogue in the Comments, because I truly believe that being the first wave of boob tube babies left a deep imprint on our generation. If nothing else, we were cued in early to the possibility of nationwide and ultimately global community. We have had the influence of others outside our family and tribe through television characters from an early age. Plus, we were treated to some of the most awesome shows ever written: Sid Caesar, Your Show of Shows, Hit Parade, I Love Lucy, Father Knows Best, I Remember Mama and a host of others. (Here’s more nostalgia if you want to listen later to some of your favorite boomer TV show theme songs.) If enough of you do the exercise, I’d love to share excerpts in a follow-up post if you’ll e-mail me your results.

Boomer Tube Babies are still a part of a great experiment that melds culture, marketing, and turning life into entertainment. The latter is such a hallmark of cool later living; it might just explain why cutting our teeth on the Golden Years of Television is giving our golden years more glitter.

Cool ‘Phinsights!

Ms. Mascot
Meet Eva, the new poster girl and dolphin mascot for Hot Flashbacks, Cool Insights. We met at Dolphin Quest on the Big Island of Hawaii on January 2, 2009. Eva has more than an archetypal feminine name (Adam and Eve, Wall-E and Eva). She is the oldest dolphin of the twelve that make their home at this seaside attraction in the Hilton Resort complex, yet she can jump the highest at 38 years old!

It’s difficult to translate dolphin to human years, but “domesticated” dolphins can live into their forties, which makes our girl no spring chicken. As you can see, she’s quite adorable. We met her whole family, including “husband” Lono and daughter Pookie. Eva, my husband Tim, and I had a great time together, and she splashed lighthearted energy and vitality. Not only is Eva the embodiment of cool later living; she also weighs 300 lbs. and carries it off with complete grace and confidence. You don’t hear her whining about losing 30 lbs. before she’ll allow herself to be seen at the beach. She eats nearly that many pounds of fish a day!

I knew there was a reason why Tim and I drew Eva for our dolphin experience—to inspire my blog followers—and me. She has a Mona Lisa smile and a bubbly laugh. She knows much more than she can tell us, given our language barrier. I just know she’s full of cool ‘phinsights. I’m sure the many she inspired in me were simple reflections of our psychic connection.

Why Do Dolphins Fascinate Us?
Frankly, I never felt compelled to swim with the dolphins; it was Tim’s big dream. Scientists believe dolphins originally lived on land and left for the sea. Even though my experience was in the Pacific, I like this short history of the Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, if you want to learn more.

Tim kept asking of the dolphins’ earth-to-sea exodus, “What do they know that we don’t?” I have heard it said that humans are the sentient beings on land; dolphins are the sentient beings in water. We share a connection in consciousness. For me, this connection translated into a feeling of relatedness, as if Eva and I had always known one another and always would … like we were part of the same extended family and shared genetic material that transcended words or explanations. We just “got” each other.

As our trip approached, I recalled my dear friend Dana’s photos and rave experiences at the very same place with a different dolphin. Soon I had dolphin fever, too. By the time we got to Dolphin Quest (DQ), I was as jazzed as my husband. I figured myself for one of the luckiest people on earth to get the opportunity to meet some of these fellow mammals face to face.

Even so, we both worried about the appropriateness of taking dolphins out of the wild. Tim was concerned about what might happen to them, as they got too old to play with the paying tourists. We were reassured these dolphins are never “put out to pasture” and have a home for life at DQ. I am convinced by our experience that the staff is utterly devoted to them--and by our quizzing our handler and reading the DQ website, that these sweet and brilliant beings have a good life.

Captives’ Audience
Domestication in any form is a tradeoff between freedom and an easier, more protected life for the animals on some levels. There are passionate arguments both for and against it. We make a similar tradeoff when we domesticate dogs and cats, something humans have done for so long, few people think twice about it. The healing aspect of the interspecies bond is one of the pluses researchers don’t need to “prove” to anyone who has ever loved an animal companion. A lovely family with a handicapped daughter got a big, heartwarming dose of dolphin medicine the day we were at DQ. Dolphin Quest on the Big Island is sensitive to special needs. Those of us who needed a little extra help were literally tagged and treated as VIPs.

Looking Up
As usual, it was astrology and the sky that cued me into the principle I was seeing at work--the opposite concepts of wildness and domestication. Wildness, freedom, and revolution are represented by Uranus. Uranus is expansion, whereas Saturn represents contraction, confinement, and responsibility. Youth is Uranus; aging is Saturn. Life is sweet when this pair on the continuum of experience is balanced. There can be a lot of freedom, even within boundaries.

Growing older is scary in spots, especially as we see some of our physical abilities decline and medical conditions creep in. This hit home hard on this trip as Tim used a wheelchair for the first time at places that would have required long walks. We may not always have the complete freedom of “the wild” as we grow older. We may have to live in more contained environments, such as assisted living—with or near relatives. Even an “active 55-plus” community is a choice to limit our immediate neighbors to a group of people based on age and age-related attributes. I struggle whether or not a more homogenous community would be good for me … and if or I how I would handle the need for assistance at some point, if it becomes necessary.

Eva taught me that even within the safety of a more protected environment, happiness and social encounters still can thrive. Sure, she jumps and does tricks for the fish. (When people jump through hoops for their meals, it’s called a job.) Nevertheless, Eva was completely engaged with us, her human playmates.

I don’t doubt for a minute that she also jumps for joy.

Moonstruck!

After ten years of marriage, my honey and I finally went on one of those moon things. This got me wondering about the origin of this sweet custom—honeymoons.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered the roots of the honeymoon are far from romantic and date to the era of Attila the Hun! (Hunnymoon?) First, it involved abduction of the bride-to-be from a neighboring village. The groom had to go into hiding with her from her family. Naturally, her relatives would be frantically searching for their missing daughter and sister. The groom’s best man was the only person who knew their whereabouts. Honeymoon is from an ancient Norse word that means hiding. Though the folklore is from the fifth century, this doesn’t sound far from a cave man dragging his woman around by her hair.

Second, the honey in the word comes from honeyed mead. The moon portion simply refers to the monthly lunar cycle. The Scandinavian custom in the first months of marriage was to drink the honeyed wine nightly. Even for those couples who actually wanted to hook up, village life was too work-heavy for newlyweds to loll around for long drinking mead or drinking in each other’s eyes. The idea grew from this that no month of marriage would be as sweet as the first with the ritual honeyed mead, especially after you have to get on with “real life.”

Attila took the abduction and mead aspects of honeymooning to new heights—well, more like lows. He was King of the Huns from 433-453 A.D. King Hunny himself not only absconded with another man’s wife, he eventually drank himself to death on mead.

In the Western world, the custom of newlyweds going on a holiday together after marriage is compliments of the British in the 19th century. Nowadays, honeymoons tend to be taken in seclusion to exotic places, or at least somewhere the couple considers special or romantic.

We just came back from Hawaii. We went on a whale-watching cruise and saw the Pearl Harbor Memorial on Oahu. Then we moved onto the Big Island of Hawaii for a week. The main event for us there was swimming with the dolphins followed by a helicopter ride over a live volcano. More details on this trip of a lifetime in another post.

Time, money, circumstances—they just never came together for us to do this until now. But we have something else that made it feel more urgent. Tim, my husband, has a medical condition that affects his mobility. While he’s still walking, he’s not getting around as well as he used to, and he has less endurance. We don’t know what the future will bring. We feel fortunate that Tim has gotten to be a sexagenarian with so much quality of life. Yet we don’t know about tomorrow. So, we swam with the dolphins while we could—something on his “Bucket List”— hang the expense.

Isn’t that how boomers should live their lives, anyway? Even if you don’t have something like a health issue nudging you:

We never know how much sand is in our hourglass.
We do know that by this time of our lives,
there’s more on the bottom than on the top.

I remember one of the sweetest moments in the movie “Michael,” where a rag-tag angel visiting earth, played by John Travolta, is melancholy as his time to leave draws near. He looks around then stares at the sunset and says, “I’m really going to miss this place.” This recollection, written before the trip, became more ironic during it when John lost his young son to a seizure while we were in Hawaii. How truly unpredictable life can be …

So, grab your honey and get every last drop of nectar out of this time around. Where we go next may be even more spectacular. But if an angel—even a fictional one who has been both places— is reluctant to leave Earth, surely we should live every second of life here to the hilt.

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Photo © Yakov Stavchansky Dreamstime.com

Notes: Sources for this post were The Honeymoon by Charles Panati and Wikipedia.

Things to Bear in Mind As We Round 2009

I’ll be on away the first week of the New Year, taking a mini-vacation from blogging. So, I’m writing ahead some thoughts to bear in mind as we enter 2009.

January 1: This is the first day of my inner journey.

It’s a new day, and a new year. The whole world is making resolutions, thinking about a new start—a new slate.

I’m going to suggest that you reconsider.

Our Gregorian calendar has led us to live off-cycle with nature for nearly 500 years. The natural New Year begins at the Spring Equinox, on or about March 20. A diet, a new project, or new beginnings are much more on cycle with the seasons and rising energy in spring. They’re more likely to work for you then.

We, too, are part of nature. Our figurative seeds need to be planted at the time of year when they are most likely to germinate, flower in summer, and be ready in autumn for harvest.

Then what is this winter change of calendar all about, like the changing of the guard?

It’s another way of counting things, often more worldly things. Happiness comes from taking time to connect with All That Is and your innermost being. Here is where your spirit meets the Great Spirit and your Higher Power. The right thing to do in winter is to take a cue from our friends the bears. Hibernate. Take quiet time. Be introspective.

This year, put the inner journey on your calendar from Day 1. Give yourself one precious moment—one minute—to make your day with a short meditation. Here’s one I love that works any day of the year:

Take three deep, healing breaths—deep inhale, deep
exhale—three times, slowly. Ask Spirit—what do you want me to know—and what do you want me to do—today?

January 6: Breakfast at Epiphanies

In addition to celebrating the visit of the Magi to Bethlehem and the conclusion of the Christmas Season, epiphany is a word that means an aha or a flash of insight. Visit last year’s post, Epiphanies, to learn more about this wonderful day and why the everyday usage of the word makes Epiphany the official holiday of this blog.

While I’m called Hot Flashbacks as the short form of this blog’s title in my e-mail address and on most social networking sites, the real emphasis in both my book and on my blog are the cool insights. I write about my insights all the time, but today, I thought I'd put the insights in your court. Let's do some exercises together to get some new aha’s. This is something we can do, like a guided meditation, as you read this post. Just pause to get some writing materials—and open a notebook or computer file. (Don’t forget to name and save the file right away to avoid accidentally losing it.) Alternatively, you could print out this post and do it later in a quiet moment.

Meditation: Imagine you are at the manger scene, coming to visit the baby Jesus. You have been following an awesome star for weeks. It is brighter, more spectacular, and shaped unlike anything you have ever seen. You know it’s a sign! You are one of the wise astrologers, an expert at deciphering larger meanings in life. This is just like a time machine, and you can create it however it would happen because you’re you—and only you have your unique gifts to give.

* What are your most precious gifts that you bring to the baby—and why?
* What will Jesus do with your gifts?
* What gifts do you get back?
* What gifts will you bring into 2009 because of this magical experience?

This is the first week of the last year in the first decade of the Third Millennium. Think of all that has happened since we worried about the Y2K crashes and food stashes on the cusp of the Year 2000! May you find some new tools and perspectives in this post to shine the star of your own inner light. The key is to slow down, rest, and visit the “manger within,” the rebirth of Love accessible inside us every day of our lives. Spirit can only speak to us when we stop talking--and listen.

A sweet, soft New Year with many moments of replenishing silence …

Vanity Fair

My parents nuzzled me gently, “Wake up, honey. Santa’s come!”

It was the most magical morning of the year. I didn’t have the slightest idea what Santa might have brought me. I was only five. I was so excited. I felt like someone plugged Christmas tree lights into a socket in my belly. I felt lit up in rainbow colors.

Padding down the familiar steps in my jammies with feet, I smelled the pine tree. A log burned on the fire in my mind, even if we didn’t have a fireplace! Then I saw it--the most spectacular thing near the Christmas tree that I had ever seen in my whole life. It was a toy vanity, my own little dressing table, just my size, with a real mirror, brushes, combs, and pretend make-up.

Santa had somehow succeeded in bringing me something so perfect; I hadn’t even thought of it myself. A vanity wasn’t in my letter to Santa that I dictated to Mom, and in that moment, I didn’t really care what was. Somewhere there was this Benevolent Being who knew my needs better than I did myself. What’s more, I sensed that he was intimately connected to my mother and father—that maybe he could only do this because they told him all about me.

The ultimate meaning of this indelible, magic moment only became clear once I was as grown-up as Mom and Dad. Christmas is about new beginnings—the rebirth of self in the light of love—the message Jesus first brought to earth on his birthday. Thinking back on that snowy morning in the suburbs of Chicago and to the first Christmas in Bethlehem, I now see a big parallel. Some of the greatest gifts we ever receive are not the ones we ask for but rather those that pleasantly surprise or hide in right in front of us, to be discovered under the tree of everyday life.

A deep one growing up, I found myself easily led to the experiences I needed for my own development, as long as I was open-minded. I didn’t always see, right away, the bigger picture of what was right for me. I’d think back at those times of the vanity—a big and obvious gift with my name on it. I was a glamour girl at heart. I loved to primp and preen. Our cat Suzy was probably the only one in our house any better at it. How did Santa know?

From this simple experience of letting love surprise me, I have since been open to many other surprises stranger than fiction, especially when taken together. I was led to find my birth families--we were separated for 38 years by adoption--and the man who was the lost love of my life and my most unhealed relationship. Once I had a decade to digest these life-changing, lost-and-found experiences, the lesson of the vanity continued to sink in a layer deeper: Be willing to look at yourself.

One day, I was sitting at my computer doing just that by scanning my feelings. I got the nagging suspicion I had someone else to find. I had a rather animated conversation with God. “What now? Who else could I possibly have to find?”

In that moment, I remembered a dramatic dream I had six months earlier about my first boyfriend. Luckily, I am an avid dream journal keeper, and I reread my night movie recap with new eyes. There was a clear message that I needed to touch base with what happened in my very first boy-girl relationship. We were only 12 to 13 in our two years together, but I knew it was more than puppy love. We only broke up because his mom was worried we were too young to be “so serious.” While I wasn’t expecting a romance after 35 years, I still missed his friendship and hoped I’d discover what it all meant by following this surely divine direction.

With the Internet by then connecting phone books and people worldwide, I popped Tim and his unusual surname into a search engine and found him living in Texas. I wrote him a long letter. He wrote back. We were stunned to see how our lives had gone down similar paths over the years—same kind of work, same church, major life moves during the same years. Surprisingly, he had never married. Before I knew it, we were traveling between cities, and he moved to mine less than six months later. We married the following year. Now together eleven years, we are still amazed by the subconscious connection we retained, our grammar school pictures he kept, and how like the vanity, our relationship was there for both of us, under life’s perennial Christmas tree—the perfect gift when the timing was right.

Too bad we call it a vanity with all the egotistical connotations of that word. In my life, the mirror is about having the bravery to see myself and trust in the lesson of that surprise gift by simply making the journey to self-reflection. It is not always an easy trip as we relive pain and others’ imperfections, not to mention our own. Eventually we learn the truth—we are love.

We are the light of the world, a mirror of the love, which is born and reborn annually in this amazing season of peace and hope. Every year we have a new chance to celebrate light. No matter how many visits Jesus or other enlightened ones make to this planet to remind us, we still carry the guiding light within us wherever we go.

It’s the same message in the Chanukah lanterns that refused to burn out; in the sun god, whose return early worshippers sought to ensure at Winter Solstice. It’s in the Muslim Hajj, the annual trip to Mecca all adults must make around this time of year at least once in their lifetime. The ritual promotes the bonds of spiritual family by showing everyone is equal in the eyes of Allah—All One Light.

Regardless of faith, the message is the same: the inner light of love joins us all like twinkling stars in the night sky.

That’s why they call it the Christmas spirit. You can only see it with the inner “I.”

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Note: The original “Vanity Fair” appeared in Unity Magazine in December 1988. This updated version celebrates the 20th anniversary of its publication.

Need more Holiday Hot Flashbacks? Visit these previous posts: Not So Silent Night, Where Are My Christmas Cards?, and Turn on the Lights!

Photo Credit: Dreamstime

Winter Solstice

• I have been doing celebrations at the change of seasons since 1988—twenty years of honoring the cycles of life. Since I’m Santa Claus at heart, it’s no surprise how much I love winter and all the wonderful celebrations from various spiritual traditions that merge into a time of blessings and good humor.

What’s a Solstice?
The word solstice is derived from two Latin words: sol, which means sun and sistere, to stand still. Winter Solstice is one of the two days a year when the Sun stands still. At Summer Solstice, the sun reaches its highest elevation, on or about June 21, our longest day. At Winter Solstice around December 21, the sun is at its lowest height and we experience the longest night of the year. (These dates refer to the solstices in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere, the two solstices are exchanged—winter in June, summer in December.) Implied in the solstice standstill is a moment of pause before a significant shift.

Why Celebrate?
Various cultures the world over have celebrated the Winter Solstice for many thousands of years. Winter Solstice observes the beginning of the solar year and rebirth of the sun. Many assume that while the exact date of Jesus’ birth is unknown, there is no accident that the ancient Christian Church selected December 25 to celebrate Christmas. (Based on the astronomical data of the time and reports of the Star of David, believed to be the conjunction or coming together of several planets in the sky, Jesus was much more likely born closer to spring, probably in March.) Winter Solstice was already a day of celebration. As Ellen Jackson conjectures in the children’s book, The Winter Solstice, “It might as well be Christmas, too.” Winter Solstice is much more ancient. It is also known as Yule, and it has many things in common with Christmas, starting with the parallels in the homonyms Sun/Son and the warmth and salvation the birth and rebirth of Light brings to the world.

If Yule captivates you, give yourself a Google little Solstice and check out some of the amazing facts, prayers, meditations, and ceremonies connected with this ancient feast. I won’t focus on them here, because there is a true festival of information right at your fingertips.

I want to do three things in this post: introduce you to one of my favorite solstice myths and walk you through two things I do at every Winter Solstice ceremony that you can do to celebrate the Solstice at home.

Raven Festival
I say often how I find inspiration in many places, and one of my favorite winter myths is from the Alaskan Inuit. I learned their winter solstice story in an episode of one of my all-time favorite TV shows, Northern Exposure. Picture Marilyn, Dr. Joel Fleischman’s secretary, telling this tale, then later in the episode, seeing the natives of Cicely, Alaska portray it as a play:

A long time ago, the raven looked down from the sky and saw that the people of the world were living in darkness. A ball of light was kept hidden by a selfish old chief. So the raven turned himself into a spruce needle and floated on the river where the chief's daughter came for water. She drank the spruce needle. She became pregnant and gave birth to a boy who was the raven in disguise. The baby cried and cried until the chief gave him the ball of light to play with. As soon as he had the light, the raven turned back into himself. The raven carried the light into the sky. From then on, we no longer lived in darkness.

What captivates me about spirituality is how every “flavor” of it repeats the same universal themes, especially a Light in the sky or from the sky that keeps us out of the dark and changes everything.

Burning the Old
I first did a burning bowl ceremony at my local Unity Church. The idea is to write on slips of paper whatever you want to get rid of in your life, whether it’s twenty pounds, a bad attitude or your anger toward your ex-husband. The women in my Solsisters group write fast and furiously in this segment of our Winter Solstice get-together, often scribbling into overtime. I can’t help but be amused sometime at all the catharsis and wrists flying. They line up and burn the paper in the fire. Like confession is good for the soul, dumping old burdens works in this form, too.

Ceremony of Recognition
One year, I realized there was something missing—something we needed to do to complement Burning the Old. We needed to recognize the accomplishments we had each made in the past year. We burn what we want to let go … but how do we memorialize or make permanent what we want to keep?

In the Ceremony of Recognition, we take another few minutes to write down what we feel we accomplished, completed … anything we each feel we deserve to recognize or thank ourselves for. I think many of you will agree that women tend to do too little of this. So here’s a meditation you can use to do your own recognition ceremony. Have pen and paper ready when you’re set to go:

Meditation

Take a three deep breaths and center yourself. Feel at one with Earth.

Now, look at yourself in the Year 2008.

-- What was your proudest accomplishment?
-- What baby steps did you take toward something new?
-- What giant leaps?
-- What did you do that you deserve credit for?
-- How did others recognize you?
-- How did others not recognize you in ways you wish they would have?
-- How were you disappointed? (It is important to recognize our disappointments.)
-- If 2008 had a name or a title phrase, what would it be?

Candlelighting Ceremony
Our Winter Solstice celebration always culminates with passing the light. We each light individual candles, igniting them from each other’s candle, passed down the line. Then we hold them up to show how our lights, merged, light up the entire room—just as the light of our spirits, when joined for good, light up the world.

I hope Winter Solstice is just the beginning of a blessed Yuletide season for you. This year’s theme at my house is the Magical Child Within. I like hosting Winter Solstice, so I can continue to soak up the warmth the Solsisters create that night through the New Year.

I want to end with two quotes, one that honors the eternal child within us and another that honors the sage stage of life represented by the baby boomers who read this blog:

“Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.” –Victor Hugo

“For the unlearned, old age is winter; for the learned it is the season of harvest.” --The Talmud

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Notes: Visit these previous posts for more information on Winter Solstice and celebrating the seasons. This Year’s Solstice Moment, when the Sun Enters Capricorn: Dec. 21, 4:04a PDT (adjust for your time zone in the US or World).