Days are shorter now, it is time to celebrate; now that the brakeless train of our planet is about to finish one more of its crazy rides, I want to wish all of you a nice new trip, with a special regard for those who got off or on along the previous 365 stations.
I read somewhere a beautiful anthropological interpretation of the meaning of the Christmas tree, previous to the arrival of modern religions. In the night of times, the tree was used as a representation of Mother Nature, in a moment when She seemed to have abandoned all of her creatures.
Think about those primitive guys, watching how daylight was becoming scarcer and scarcer every day, the fruits disappearing from every tree, the hunting becoming harder due to hibernation and migration. Those guys had no long term memory, not even a calendar to help them remember that they had gone through all of that many times before. For them, there wasn’t the slightest guarantee that longer days and warm sun would ever come back. All they knew was that a feeling of cold, death and darkness surrounded them, and it was getting tighter every day.
So, what did they do? They celebrated Mother Nature. The tree was the symbol they used. They were asking Her to give back Her gifts so, to make it happen in a way, they filled the tree with symbolic gifts for everybody. They asked for more light and color, so they decorated the tree with shiny surfaces and candles, images of stars… In hope that Mother Nature would hear the call, the “polite” suggestion…
And then, time after time, the miracle happened: light came back, flowers bloomed again, animals reared their heads… Their prayers had been answered.
Beautiful, isn’t it? Do you have other stories of the kind?
Merry Christmas to everybody.
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