The Winds of Thor
You can see it out of the corner of your eye. A strangely familiar shape is approaching you but at the same time something seems out of place. You are nearing your destination with every step but something momentarily seems to nag you to a side, you just have to look and you just might decide you have to go deeper and see. There's something over there and it needs your attention. You look.
The Halloween ornaments are in the lawns and hanging from eves and trees of neighboring houses. First one house, then two, three, four and more. It will grow. The neighborhood will become a competition of bigger, better, "more monstrous than last year" displays mixing grotesque horror and cartoonish humor into a menagerie of rubber and plastic mayhem. The Groovy Ghoulies in one yard will serenade the neighbor's truly gross zombie beach with campy bubble gum pop. In another yard, obviously once a family but now only dressed in sheets, there is a picnic next to an overturned jalopy. Perhaps it's also Casper's birthday. I've never asked before. People are particularly frightened by black cats, so they seem to be everywhere, ubiquitous. Real ones and fake wooden ones. It gets hard to tell them apart.
It gets thick in this neck of the woods.
Soon it will turn another corner. The dead and the undead will begin to mix with the ancient and accepted Pilgrim scenes. We'll be talking turkey with our mechanic while the kids repeat their annual visit to the dentist. Cavities tend to grow in the mouths of babes, but the things that seem to separate the adults are appearing to grow smaller as winter crawls in. Meanwhile, the dampness of the cold air is growing and our need for protection tends to expand. Don the pullovers, cardigans, layers of clothing and shield yourself against the growing frosts of winter.
The celebrations that are about to take place in the coming weeks and months have an ancient history. There is more ancestry in this season than any other in the year, and with good psychological and sociological reason: we need each other. In ancient times the community had to draw itself together and bring the harvest in. In ancient times the community would celebrate its gratitude and prepare for the dreaded winter. In ancient times the community would huddle together as tightly as it could and also help support neighbors in outlying territories. And it is from these patterns that our modern traditions arose, traditions that helped guarantee the lasting conditions of our western culture.
Take a look around you and you will see that the world moves in circles. The globe spins around on its axis. The Earth orbits the Sun. The Sun flies through the galaxy with its system of planets in tow, moving around the galaxy within our particular arm of the spiral known as The Milky Way. We are all a part of this ever repeating cycle of returns. And this is something the ancients noticed a long, long time ago.
Psychology has made note of this as well. We all move in cycles in our lives, in our months, weeks and days. Every year we find ourselves in similar places, having relationships with time and space in ways that we are not always conscious of. Like birds and bees who use the position of the Sun to guide them, our mind and our emotions are oftentimes guided by the subliminal condition of the Sun and stars and other lights in the sky. The changing of the colors around us also signals a time to change within us. We may even be unconsciously reminded of events, feelings, and conditions from our history - and we may even unwittingly be reacting to these "ghosts of Christmas Past" without even being aware.
It doesn't have to be the holiday season for our minds to pick up on these external cues. The location of the Sun in the sky in relation to the roads we travel down in our daily routines will unconsciously bring up the feelings of our past. Anniversaries of all kinds, even if we aren't marking them clearly on our wall calendars, can have an effect on how we feel. The day you found out your lover was cheating on you may haunt you for several years, even if you consciously don't remember that date. Beginnings and endings of all kinds, those that have had significant impacts on us at the time they occur, can get ingrained in our souls and aligned with the locations of the Sun and the planets and stars in the sky. Every year the Sun repeats its position. The constellations are equally fixed but the planets will each have their own schedule - so some occurrences will be brought up in strange ghostly shapes in our hearts from time to time because our unconscious observer is indeed aware.
This time of year as the leaves fall, the flowering plants wither and rivers begin to freeze, is the time of year we gather closer together with each other. This is the time of year of sharing our individual bounties with each other as the days grow shorter and the nights grow longer. Tradition has it that we bring fire indoors and our families travel to be closer together, closer to the hearth. Tradition brings us good cheer as we unwrap our mothball lined old clothes and linens, share them with the needy, and involve ourselves with communal merry making in an effort to keep our minds and hearts off the dread winter. These are no accidents of our culture. These are not habits created arbitrarily by a government or single person "just because." No. A community needs these traditions in order to survive, and that is why we find in anthropology that these are indeed universal truths, common roots that all of our ancestors partook in.