Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/118160
For millennia, winter brought fear, hunger, cold and death. In the northern hemisphere, these dangers peaked around the third week of December, when virtually every region – from Japan to the British Isles, from Scandinavia to Iran – explored ways to appease the celestial powers so that light would return to the Earth. Today, thousands of years after humankind's Neolithic predecessors first sought to mitigate the visceral chill of long winter nights, modernday mid-winter festivals remind that nature's cycles still need to be observed, that hope springs from the gathering of friends, from music and magic and from ceremonies involving the transformative power of fire. In B.C., this visceral awareness of the sun's 28 W E S T W O R L D p26-29_Winter Festivals.indd 28 >> power plays itself out in a vibrant kaleidoscope of traditions both well-established and newly rooted, including those practised by the various visible minorities that comprise a quarter of the province's four million people. While immigrants from the British Isles and northern Europe once dominated, B.C. today has the fastest rising inflow of new Canadians – primarily from Asia – in the country. And nowhere is this cultural mix more apparent than mid-winter in metropolitan Vancouver, home to 70 per cent of the province's most recent transplants. Jewish Hanukkah candles, the Iranian longest-night feast of Yalda, Christmas stockings hung by the fireplace, the Vietnamese eating of special glutinous rice balls at mid-winter's Dongzhi Festival – all are evidence that a diversity of 21st-century communities still take comfort in sharing the darkness. And that ahead, as every celebrant knows, lies the year's gradual rebirth – amid springtime, planting and warmth. It is no surprise, then, that throughout history the sun has been humankind's most durable god. That is why dozens of star-topped Christmas trees line walkways along West Vancouver's Dundarave Beach as the longest night approaches. But also why, amid nearby drumming, an enormous bonfire sends flames airborne and cinders 100 metres into the night sky. Christian or pagan, Zoroastrian or Taoist, Celtic or Buddhist, fire is the universal answer to things ominous. Fire is the sun brought to Earth. And that is why, adja WINTER 2011 10/25/11 11:58:15 AM