Today is Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year. It’s not an easy day for me. I have seasonal affective disorder, also known as SAD. The long periods of darkness in the winter are not easy for me. So, the longest night just means that I have a shorter period of time to enjoy the sunlight. That didn’t always used to be the case.
When I was younger, before my puberty hormones kicked in and depression was a thing, I enjoyed Winter Solstice. School was out for vacation. Christmas was only a few days away. Plus, it was Pops’ birthday.
Pops is my grandfather, my mother’s dad. His birthday celebration always kicked off Christmas for me when I was a child. My sister and I would go to his house and help celebrate it. Then, we would just spend the nights leading up to Christmas at my grandparents’ house.
We did typical pre-Christmas festivities with them, like tree decorating and cookie baking. But, my grandparents would turn each event into a production. I guess they wanted to be sure and record it for posterity.
My grandmother, Mom, was in charge of the visual portion of the holiday season. With her first generation Polaroid camera she took pictures of just about everything, especially my sister and I. My grandfather, Pops, was in charge of the audio portion. Armed with his portable Radio Shack Realistic portable cassette tape recorder with an external microphone, he would record just about everything between his birthday, which featured my sister and I singing “Happy Birthday” to Christmas dinner, which featured the sounds of silverware clinking against the plates.
As my sister and I got older, Christmas celebrations changed. My parents divorced. My sister and I had homework and school projects to do, so we wouldn’t spend a week with Mom and Pops. But, the most difficult for me, was the changes that came over time.
Mom and Pops began to slow down. They experienced the deaths of parents and siblings. The Polaroid and cassette recorder stopped working. Mom got a newer model Polaroid camera and Pops’ cassette recorder gave way to a video cassette recorder. I tried to go along with the new equipment, but it didn’t feel “right”.
The new recording equipment was bad enough. But, then, Mom and Pops began to age. Pops’ many years of smoking caught up with him and he died from lung cancer. Mom lived a few years longer than Pops, but the dementia that only Pops noticed before he died, became apparent to the rest of the family.
With the Christmas experience that Mom and Pops provided gone along with them, I began to dread the Winter Solstice. The long darkness echoed the grief in my heart. There wasn’t enough daylight and I wasn’t eating Pops’ birthday cake with him.
In 2011, things changed. That year, a good friend invited me to go to a Longest Night church service at an intown church. I went, not knowing what to expect. What I experienced changed my heart. Rather than grieve the long darkness, like I did, the church service celebrated it. They rejoiced that the light would become a bigger part of the day.
It was a perspective shift for me. Instead of mourning the darkness, I would rejoice in the coming light. Yes, my loved ones are no longer physically with me, but I have my memories. In my memory, they never get older or replace their cameras and cassette recorder. I can celebrate them along with the light.
Journey with Monica 