(also available as a stick-figure comic for the visually inclined)

Where-ever the days have grown short and the nights become cold, where snow and ice have bound the land and silence the field, human hearts have quailed in the long darkness, and rebound in festival. For ages before a certain boy was born beneath an ominous star, thousands of years before a particular oil-lamp remained lit for an improbably long while, we humans have brought light and life and feast and charity to the year's darkest season.

A green tree thwarts winter's black-and-white palette, bonfires and candles defy the pitch of night. A table heaped high with good food breaks the barren span between harvest and planting, gifts given freely chase back the mean spirit that grows in times of hardship.

Our rituals and traditions (whatever they may be) call forth the good, warm, shining parts of our life that we might otherwise chance to forget, transforming our darkest hours into the brightest and most treasured.

These days are thus holy days, no matter their trappings.

Make light in the darkness,
-David Adamson.