Today is St. Lucia day—a holiday that is little known in the US, but an important holiday in Scandinavia and Italy. It’s believed to mark the martyrdom of St. Lucy on this day, with references to celebrations of her life dating as far back as the fifth century CE.
I had a Swedish grandmother, and growing up I was told stories of St. Lucia Day—of the tradition where the eldest daughter brings sweet rolls to the household by candlelight, her head crowned with a wreath of evergreen holly leaves and candles. Of processions by candlelight in towns who had crowned their own Lucia for that year. As an eldest daughter, I had always wished we lived in Sweden so that I could claim my place as St. Lucia each December, holding candles in the darkness.
It’s believed that Christian missionaries brought St. Lucy to Scandinavia, and that the story of a young girl bringing light in the darkness doubtless resonated with the practices and beliefs of the Scandinavians in the darkness of a northern December. It’s the common grafting of Christian holidays onto pagan or other cultural practices—and the solstice celebrations overlapped with St. Lucia’s day.
As John Donne wrote in his poem A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day:
'TIS the year's midnight, and it
is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk…
Living this far north, December 13 is indeed a very dark time of year. But I had wondered why St. Lucia day was not on the actual solstice day, since her name and the rituals are obvious nods to the darkness of the north at this time of year. After reading about her legend some years ago, I found the answer: it’s believed that in older calendars St. Lucia day was most definitely held on the solstice, but with the move away from the Julian calendar, the weeks shifted and so: it now falls on December 13.
I’ve lived in several northern latitudes—Scotland, Norway, and Alaska—and have learned firsthand how important the solstice becomes, marking the extremes of the year and a return to a more measured balance between light and dark. Both winter and summer feel like a release, a finality that we can now turn the corner towards light, or towards shadow. For the winter solstice, particularly, we can look forward to the swift changes that begin to occur not long after we reach that nadir of the year.
Right now in Anchorage, latitude 61, the sun doesn’t rise until 10.36 am; twilight begins around 3, with sunset officially at 3:40 pm. We’re still losing over a minute of daylight each day as we move towards the 21st. There are times when you realize you haven’t seen friends or even family during daylight for months, given that most of the daylight is reserved for the office, school, work. There’s a bit of an eerie, liminal feeling to the skies, to the twilight, to the daylight, to the slant of the sunlight, so low on the horizon.
St. Lucy of Syracuse (Sicily) was born in 283 AD in Syracuse, Sicily, and was killed there in 303 AD during Roman persecution under the Emperor Diocletian. One legend tells of how she brought food and aid to Christians hiding in the Roman catacombs, the candle-lit wreath on her head lighting her way while freeing her hands to hold as much food as possible. The celebration of Saint Lucy's Day is said to help one live through the winter days with hope towards the light that will come, as Lucy heralds the light of Christ that would arrive on Christmas day. Devotions to St. Lucy are practiced in Italy and Sicily, as well as parts of Croatia and Hungary, where wheat is planted on St. Lucy’s day so that it can grow several centimeters by Christmas, the green shoots symbolizing the new life that will arise out of the darkness.
St. Lucy—Lucia, meaning “light” in Latin—lux, lucis—was betrothed against her will to a pagan. She had taken a vow of virginity, and convinced her mother to cancel the marriage and donate the dowry to the poor. Her suitor, enraged, reported Lucy as a Christian to the authorities. Lucy was threatened with being taken to a brothel if she did not renounce her beliefs, but they were unable to move her, even with a thousand men and fifty oxen trying to uproot her. This was no way for a girl to behave, so they stacked wood around her to burn her alive—but Lucy refused to stop speaking of how her death would lessen the fear of other Christians. A soldier stuck a spear through her tongue to stop her words, but to no avail, so they gouged out her eyes, which were miraculously restored. She was only able to die once she was given Christian rites.
In many icons and images of her, she holds her eyes on a plate, as if in offering—to take her sight so that you too can see the path towards light in the midst of darkness. Of having an inner light to always see by, even in the dark solstices, those midnights of the years, of life.
When I was pregnant—years ago now—my first ultrasound revealed that I had a cyst that could potentially be cancerous, and would threaten my pregnancy if it wasn’t removed. I had to have surgery three months in—the first surgery I had ever had. It would knock myself and my growing child unconscious, and there was a risk with that. So my experience becoming a mother was not exactly calm sailing, although I haven’t really heard of one yet that ever was. I was scared. I was worried. It was agony to anticipate it all and not know the outcome, that I could endanger the alien being growing inside me whom I hadn’t yet met.
I didn’t grow up with religion in my family, but I had always been fascinated by stories of early saints and the hagiographies that accompany their legends—particularly those of women who stood for their beliefs against threats of rape and violence and found transcendence. I thought of them as a sort of extension of Grimm’s fairy tales that I had loved—the violent ones that had a verisimilitude about them that wasn’t attractive because of the gore, but because it made them all that much more brutal and wild—as if in a time of no laws the specificity of the violence felt like a natural part of the otherworldly-ness of the stories. Beauty and terror both, creating the sublime. And as a girl, saints stories are hero stories where girls could be the main protagonist—where we, of course, learn that a woman’s hero story is through death, through becoming martyrs, through sacrifice. As Susan Sontag wrote of Simone Weil, that 20th-century mystic herself:
Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint.
When I knew the date of my surgery, I felt like I needed a talisman or something for good luck—just something that could help me feel a little less jostled by the different anxieties. I looked up the saint for that day—December 13. Santa Lucia day. I had forgotten. When I was reminded that it was St. Lucy’s saint day, the light in a darkness I had first learned of from my grandmother as a young girl, I was instantly reassured that it was going to be ok somehow. I’m not a believer but I do believe in mystery—and as Robert Pogue Harrison has said,
Sometimes the living adopt their ancestors, but sometimes the dead have a way of adopting the living.
It felt like maybe an ancestor had adopted me for this occasion, that I had found a small protection I sought as my child and I went into the unknowns of surgery. I bought a Saint Lucy medallion to wear for the occasion and mark the day.
Thankfully it all went as well as possible—the cyst was removed successfully, it was not malign, and my alien child was not injured. The baby’s heartbeat was doing well despite being knocked out by anesthesia. My doctor told me she could see my baby during the surgery—I couldn’t imagine seeing the little body growing within my own. I was so thankful he was strong.
I’ve worn a St. Lucy medallion around my neck ever since that year. I have an icon of her on my desk, holding her plate of eyes (very Grimm’s fairy tale stories, really). I like the reminder of her conviction. And to always look for the light in darkness—literal, metaphorical, or poetical. As Donne ends his poem:
Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.
"I’m not a believer but I do believe in mystery." This, me too. I love the stories of the saints, how people have appealed to them, all of it. The people of Belcourt, ND, on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, still have a festival for Saint Anne, who was the patron saint of the voyageurs, who would seek her favor when leaving Montreal to paddle into the interior. I love stuff like that. Mystery. Ritual. All of it.
I'm also envious that you have lived in the two place I most want to: Alaska and Norway. I still hope to visit at least one of them, hopefully both.