Is there a hint of a bounce in your step and a smile on your face? There is?
Oh you old pagan, you sun-worshipper.
From here it’s up.
Sol is sun and sticere the Latin for to stand still.
Because at the solstice the sun ceases its six months of decline and seems to stay in one place for a day or two before beginning its trek back up the sky to summer.
Sunnstede they called it in Old English — with stede meaning place or position — and we still should, for it is an event that ties us to our ancestors and strips away the nonsense of religion and takes us right back to being what we are, which is the children of the sun.
Lyttelton feels especially solstitial.
We live in a volcanic crater, looking south towards the three-month winter darkness of Antarctica.
At this time of the year the sun rises late over the Port Hills and disappears early behind them, especially for those of us perched high on the crater’s face.
Right now my house gets two hours of direct sunlight either side of noon through a notch between peaks, the dead centre of which is my measuring point, the place the sun stands at sunnstede.
That notch is my Temple of Karnak, my Newgrange, my Torreon at Machu Picchu, my very own Stonehenge.
The old Germanic tribes knew the season as Yule.
Yule was a time of clan-gathering, feasting, sacrificing, oath-making and all the other things that the pagans enjoyed and that we still do.
To mark the observable truth that the world was turning they felled a tree and burned it whole, a celebration of heat and light, a celebration of the sun’s rebirth.
They called it the yule log.
And drinking went with it — drinking of mead, drinking of ale — in the great halls of the pagans.
I was raised in England – Angle-land, named after the Germanic invaders of the fifth century who were every bit as pagan, drunk and warlike as the later Vikings — so the winter solstices of my childhood were at Christmas.
And every Christmas my mother made a cake in the shape of a barrel and smeared it with chocolate icing to look like tree bark and stuck a bit of holly in it and called it a yule log.
Paganism has never gone away, it makes too much sense.
Of course the Christians hijacked the winter solstice, declaring it, without a scrap of evidence, to be Christ’s date of birth and dressed the hard old ceremonies in prissy new robes.
But look what’s lasted, look what’s endured.
Christmas for most of us is just what it was to the pagans, a party and a feasting and a clan-gathering at the turn of another year.
The Christians swiped Easter too, of course, pinning the resurrection of Christ — again without a scrap of evidence — on to the ancient festival of the spring equinox, the time when growth returns.
According to Bede, the venerable historian, the pagans named the festival after the fertility goddess Eostre.
Hence the Easter chickens and the Easter bunnies and all the rest of the paraphernalia of spring which have as much to do with Christ as the yule log does.
(Not long after Easter came the month of May when regeneration was strongly under way in the northern hemisphere and it was time for a bit of dancing round the maypole. But rather than being a quaint little bit of English Tourist Board folkism this has its roots in worship of the great phallus of regeneration. Those pagans were of the earth.)
New Zealand is effectively post-Christian.
Christchurch cathedral still lies in ruins because so few people feel the need for it.
We’ve spent the money on a stadium and other things we’ll actually use.
Our festivals should reflect the lives we lead.
Matariki is a good start, a midwinter knees-up, and soundly based on a celestial recurrence.
Christmas and Easter are already secular, and should be renamed accordingly.
Why not tie them explicitly to the seasons that dictate everything, to the sun that we circle and depend on?
If nothing else it might make us as conscious as the ancients were of the cyclical nature of our existence and the freakish chance that set us just so in the cosmos.
Can you feel your pagan blood stirring?
It never went away.
We are our ancestors and all the better for it.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
