Season of Dark, Season of Light

Season of Dark, Season of Light

It is getting colder and darker here in Sweden, and in Stockholm at night, the city is lit by fire. Small fires, in the form of candles, torches and 12-18 inch fire pits (we have no English vocabulary for them), but fire none the less. As soon as it gets dark, any small shop or any restaurant that is open has fire outside, in one form or another, to let people know. On sidewalks everywhere, there are lanterns with candles, open candles, or, for the larger tourist places, the larger fire pits or torches. In small restaurants, they turn off (or dim) the electric lights and simply light the place with candles, in chandeliers, on tables, on the stairs, on the counter, in wall sconces. In homes, too, according to our Swedish friends, it is time to light candles at night, all around one’s home. Since few apartments have curtains or shades, as one walks the streets, one’s way is lit by streetlights and lamplights from people’s windows, but it is also comforting to know that indoors, many people have their candles lit.

The most lovely form that this takes are the candles that are lit on sidewalks, in order to let one’s guests know, first, how to get to one’s apartment from the nearest subway stop, (so the spacing of candles every 15 feet or so along the sidewalk), second, that one has arrived at the correct building, and third, to follow the steps in the building until wherever one’s apartment is. I guess that since the king who decided to knock down all those wooden buildings all over Stockholm in the 1880s-1920s had them replaced with stone, people aren’t worried about fires destroying the city. Certainly for such a large city, one rarely hears sirens.

The other night a local social institution (Masons?) had a large party, and there were candles guiding the way from the T-stop above our street, down our street, around the corner, across the street (not actually ON the street, of course), and then up the 40-50 steps that lead from the sidewalk up to the little hilltop that the building is on. Each of those steps had a large lit candle smack in the center of the step, and it was breath-takingly lovely.

All of this helps me to understand something about the Swedish soul. Yul (Yule) is coming, and there are the beginnings of Yul decorations in shops: red-painted candelabras, the winter-gnomes (tomtar, the same name as for Santa, who IS one of these gnomes) who live in the north with the reindeer-herding Sami (usually these sometimes helpful, sometimes trouble-making house-gnomes live under the floor boards of nice people, but some live in the north, with the reindeer). In early December, Swedes will celebrate St. Lucia Day, when the family will be awakened by the daughter of the house, carrying a tray of food, and wearing a crown of LIT candles. If she has brothers, they may dress as star-boys and follow her with lit lanterns. Gamla Stan, the Old Town, will be lit with beauty. The shallow fountain-pools in parks will be filled with water to freeze for ice-skating. And Swedes will celebrate their Mid-Winter Festival of Light; not a religious Christmas, in this profoundly secular society, and not an orgy of consumerism, as in our supposedly religious society, but a festival both celebrating the winter, the cold and the dark (by late December, tnhere will be a scant 6 hours of light in Stockholm; it will be full dark by 3:00 pm here, and of course, even earlier north of here. Where the Sami live, it will be dark all day), and fighting it, with their light. Sweden, that nation of 8 million do-gooders, which took in half a million refugees from our war in Iraq, plus thousands of refugees from other wars in Africa, Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia, Kosovo, which gives a higher percentage of their national income to international relief than any other nation, and which generously shares its national wealth among its own people, IS a light among nations, the city on a hill that we Americans aspire to be, but can never be as long as our central defining identity is individualism, each person for themselves. I say, in this season of growing darkness and cold, let there be light.