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daytripper FULLTILT Traditions When the earth's axis leans away from the sun, it's time to light up the night BY DANIEL WOOD P H OTO G RA P H Y BY RO N SA N G H A "For everything," says Ecclesiastes, "there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven." And on this cold December evening, with the moon rising into total eclipse and the year's longest night ahead, the ragtag, tuba-tooting, trumpet-blasting musicians moving out of the shadows are dressed in white – like ghosts set loose upon the living. There are crinolined and parasol-carrying goddesses – or maybe itinerant spirits – in white, too. There are dreadlocked drummers and wide-eyed children with glowing airborne lanterns – all Vancouver mid-winter celebrants, gathering below a gigantic, unlit, wooden pinwheel atop Granville Island's eastern hill as the first kerosene-soaked torch is ignited. Then, the flame gradually ascends from hand-held torch to hand-held torch – the fire passed upward, skyward, toward the false sun's fiery transformation. >> Across False Creek on this same night, a kilometre to the east, 57-yearold Yoko Tomita crouches with a Santa Claus cap on her head and the ancient Japanese tradition of Toji propelling her. Almost invisible amid 150 handmade rice-paper lanterns within the dark and forested Dr. Sun Yat-sen Chinese Garden of Vancouver's Chinatown, she is watching the carp drawn to her pond-side lanterns' firelight. "I believe in light," she says. "Especially at the darkest time of year." Her task is to keep the myriad candles lit and, in this way, lure the sun back from its decline. For the lanterns, like the giant bonfire lit annually atop Japan's Mt. Fujisan on the year's longest night, are Toji solar symbols. Nights are full of danger, myths say. Ghosts lurk. Anything can happen. WESTWORLD p26-29_Winter Festivals.indd 27 >> W I N T E R 2 0 1 1 27 10/25/11 11:58:07 AM

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