Tommy Denton

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Despite the diverse rituals and other festivities attending the holidays we celebrate during these winter days and nights -- and which some of us insist on fighting over -- all have something in common with certain primal urges that should unite us.

Just three nights ago -- at 7:22 p.m. last Thursday -- the winter solstice ushered in the latest in a countless series of celestial events: Earth experienced its shortest day of the year.

At the winter solstice, because of the tilt of our home planet at 23 degrees and 27 minutes off the perpendicular to the plane of its orbit around the sun, the Northern Hemisphere leans farthest away from the sun, thus allowing the shortest exposure of sunlight during the year.

Someone, somewhere eons ago noticed the first indications of this annual pattern and began conveying to others through oral tradition the systematic regularity of the cycle. Anthropologists and archeologists have concluded that human beings in time began to associate the solstice with new beginnings, and thus hope.

Early observers of the natural order apparently assigned certain powers to forces that influenced the way life went on. Light from the sun, they eventually concluded, not only allowed them to see by day what the forces of nature were doing to and for them, but they also came to believe that the sun itself was the source of their destiny.

Thus were born early forms of religion. Attending to the cycles of sun and moon, early human beings recognized a correlation between changing seasons and harvests of crops, wild game and fish that allowed them to survive and thrive -- or not.

As they observed the movements of heavenly bodies, scholars believe, they came to fear that some unseen, willful power could deprive them of light if they were not sufficiently solicitous by performing vigorous ceremonial pleadings that would gain favor.

Neolithic farmers some 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of ancient Mesopotamia may not have mastered astronomical precision to predict a solstice, but they apparently conducted corresponding fertility rites, fire festivals and offerings to their gods and goddesses to gain favor with the powers that be.

Throughout history, ancient cultures created their finest architectures -- temples, tombs and other sacred structures such as Stonehenge -- so that they aligned with the solstices and equinoxes.

Many medieval Catholic cathedrals and churches throughout Europe included solar observatories in their design to affirm the relationship between seasonal passages and the liturgical calendar for religious observances. Specifically, such astronomical calculations were necessary to predict the date of Easter.

Historians as well as biblical scholars have speculated about whether Jesus was born in the rocky plains of ancient Palestine during springtime and not the winter as now celebrated.

But Christmas as a relatively modest religious celebration in the early Christian church moved to the winter solstice about 1,600 years ago -- quite a bit before English emerged from its Germanic roots to describe winter wonderlands and snow-covered wreaths of Nordic spruce and Teutonic holly.

A universal instinct has seemed always to inspire a sense of awe in the patterns and portents of the solar cycle. Winter solstice celebrations are part of the cultural heritages of such diverse peoples as several American Indian tribes, Iranians, Pakistanis, sub-Saharan Africans, Chinese and an array of European traditions that preceded the Christian era.

The Jewish celebration of Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights commemorating the Maccabees' victory 2,300 years ago over the Greeks and the rededication of the temple at Jerusalem, is tied to both lunar and solar calendars, and began on Dec. 16 this year.

Like so many solstice observances that employ a ceremonial flame, Hanukkah's placement of candles at the center of the ritual captures the same desire to celebrate light -- in both its literal and its spiritual senses.

Other traditions, too -- Christian celebrations arising from old Russian, German, Polish and Spanish folkways -- bathe their rituals of family gatherings and worship in the glow of candlelight.

May this divided and often angry world pause today to light a candle and contemplate the primal human impulse to connect to some universal source of light and life.

Peace and joy to all.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.