The star that kept on shining

(not yo mama's Moravian history story)

Happy Christmas Eve, Yule, Hanukkah, 3 days post solstice, & everything else too!

As the sun slowly begins to grow stronger I think about the mythos of the Holly King & the Oak King at this time of year, and every time I do I hear Longfellow’s quote in my head:
The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.

There are a lot of things that bring me hope on long nights,
one of them is our collective human history.

We have to dig deep in our memories of history lessons to remember that folks killing folks over reading the bible in their native tongue was a big thing for hundreds of years.
We don’t go about making the sign of the cross because neighbor Patty doesn’t go to church and has a lot of cats, & we don’t drown Patty in a witch trial on a Thursday afternoon either.
Yes, we’ve come a long way from murderous dogma of bible ideals and paranoid drowning of cat-ladies-cum-witches.

I know it still depends on the area of the world you live in, safety being a relatively nouveau fragile happening.

But on this Christmas Eve I thought I’d tell you one of the most heartbreaking yet hopeful stories I know. It’s a story of my people, who aren’t really my people at all as it turns out.
It’s a story of what life can look like if we care less about the means and more about heart and hope of a good idea, throwing out purity, retaining transcendence.

& it starts with a boy named Jan.