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ON THE YEAR'S LONGEST NIGHT, an illuminated tree hung with lanterns occupies a central place in Vancouver's Roundhouse (page 27). (opposite) At venues around the city's False Creek — in Yaletown, on Granville Island and at Chinatown's Dr. Sun Yat-sen Chinese Garden — fire, revelry, magic and music mark mid-winter celebrations. cent to the illuminated Christmas trees and the bonfire in West Vancouver, the Tiddley Cove and Bowen Island Morris dancers are step-dancing to a furious melodeon-driven Celtic rhythm. The women in fake moustaches and the men in blackface with stovepipe hats and ivy-bedecked bowlers wear ankle and shoelace bells, their raggedy red vests covered with assorted badges and pins. Drums and tambourines and fiddles accompany the dancers in centuries-old rhythmic patterns. Says Tiddley Cove dancer June Harman: "We dance to revive the sun. The old order's breaking down, so Morris dancing's about being hopeful in the face of the unknown. It's about replacing disorder with merriment." Meanwhile, as nights lengthen and the spirits of the dead are said to wander, most East Asians – both here and across the Pacific – make certain their ancestors are not forgotten. Ninety-six-year-old Quan Chu-wing slowly ascends the stairs of Chinatown's Evergreen Taoist Church and stands before the wall-mounted, black-and-white photographs of his parents (and his long-dead young son) – three faces among hundreds in the church's quiet Hall of Homage. Like many Chinese immigrants (and their hundreds of thousands of descendants in B.C.), Quan marks the arrival of the Dongzhi winter solstice season by honouring celestial relatives. Smouldering joss-sticks in hand, Quan bows and prays to the photos of his family, drinks cups of tea, whispers the Chinese toast "Yam seng" and burns piles of ceremonial, gold-leafed funeral money at a nearby incinerator. As the yin of winter cold and darkness and the yang of springtime fire and energy are joined in smoke, the year's cosmic balance is re-established, the spirit world is nourished and the protection of heavenly forces sought for the year ahead. It's no coincidence, according to most scholars, that the season's pre-eminent event – Christmas – occurs close to the year's longest night. Early authorities, lacking Biblical clues to the date of Jesus's birth, appropriated the time of Rome's mid-winter Saturnalia festival, which marked the yearly rebirth of the Unconquered Sun. Likewise, Jewish Festival of Light devotees light their menorah candles at Hanukkah as the deepest wintertime darkness descends across the northern hemisphere. Throughout the eastern Mediterranean, in fact, old religions – such as Persia's fire-worshipping Zoroastrianism – have commemorated the annual ascension of light over darkness. Along North Vancouver's Lonsdale Avenue, many of Greater Vancouver's 60,000 Iranians are shopping for the Persian culture's winter solstice festival. Blending Zoroastrian mythology and monotheistic modifications, Yalda marks when celestial forces of darkness are strongest, and the forces of light commence their annual reconquest of night's evil. In preparation, shoppers fill Lonsdale's Yass Bazaar, buying dates, pistachio nuts, nougat and auspicious seed-filled fruit such as pomegranates and watermelons that symbolize the time of fertility just ahead. Social anthropologist and author Massoume Price is one of many Iranians who maintain old-world winter solstice traditions in their adopted land. Price buys the requisite dried nuts and fresh fruit at Yass Bazaar, then joins family and friends to celebrate. Candles are lit, mimicking the bonfires once set in rural villages across Iran on the year's longest night. Halved watermelons are embossed with meticulously carved floral patterns and tea is served from a big, brass samovar. The young dance and sing. Elders tell stories in Farsi. And custom dictates that – long into the night – pages are serendipitously opened from the collected work of the revered 14th-century Sufi poet Hafez, silent wishes made, the passage read aloud and the lines' significance analyzed for clues to the future's unfolding. "Night is the origin of religion," says Naomi Singer, artistic director of Vancouver's Winter Solstice Lantern Festival. "Night is elemental. That's why the multicultural is central to mid-winter celebrations." Surrounding her as she sits within Yaletown's Roundhouse Community Centre are dozens of people making final preparations. There are young New Age worshippers. There are Celtic Mummers and Chinese lantern-makers. There are Buddhists and Christians, Muslims and Jews. A sun-phoenix hangs on a wall to her left. A three-metre, spinning and illuminated mandala hangs opposite. A symbolic tree of life, its branches full of lanterns, is being assembled to her right. Nearby, children glue colourful tissue-paper and bamboo globes that will become candle-lit lanterns. And all around: symbols of fire, transformation and rebirth, ancient forces often overlooked in today's secular, urban and electric times. Says Singer: "City people lose their connection to nature. The solstice isn't important, they say. December 21? Everyone's thinking: Christmas. But the sun's return means animals reproduce, crops grow. Life itself is possible. Celebrating the sun links us to fundamentals. Light transforms the Earth." By the time the winter solstice has passed and the planet has just begun its movement toward spring, the great blazing sun-fire atop the Granville Island hill has been reduced to ashes, just as West Vancouver's beach bonfire has grown cold. But North Vancouver's Yalda celebrants are still scouring the poet Hafez for hints of what the year ahead will bring. And in a vast, dimly lit room at the Roundhouse, hundreds of revellers still shuffle along a winding, candle-lined, maze-like labyrinth – silhouetted figures creeping in the darkness, trying to find a successful path among the firemaze's false leads, necessary backtrackings and dead ends. "It's a metaphor for life," whispers the sun-faced, gold-masked figure who ushers visitors along. And within the pond in nearby Sun Yat-sen Garden, the carp still look up from underwater, seemingly mesmerized by the pale glow of lantern light amid the night's all-encompassing blackness. i For info on Vancouver's 18th-annual winter solstice festival: secretlantern.org WESTWORLD p26-29_Winter Festivals.indd 29 >> W I N T E R 2 0 1 1 29 10/25/11 11:58:24 AM

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