Seasonal Traditions, Old and New

Christmas is not a huge celebration in our house. We don’t trim a Christmas tree, bake holiday cakes, or hang colorful lights around the eaves. There are no milk and cookies waiting for Santa to come barreling down the chimney, hungry and thirsty from his sooty exertions. But before you get the idea that we’re a couple of Scrooges who do our best to ruin the joy for everyone else, let me reassure you that Christmas doesn’t pass us by entirely unnoticed. We have a rather eclectic set of holiday traditions, mixed and matched from my childhood memories and my husband’s Persian culture.

So even though Christmas is fairly low-key around here, we still manage to get into the holiday spirit. Here are my favorite ways to celebrate this joyful time of year.

My favorite ancient Persian ritual:

A few days before Christmas, we celebrate Shabeh Yalda, a winter solstice celebration whose roots go back to ancient Persia and its Zoroastrian rulers. (I blogged about it here last year.) On this longest night of the year, we stay up late eating pomegranates, preserved peaches, watermelon, and pistachio nuts, while reading Persian poetry, usually Hafez or Rumi. There is something about eating summer fruit in the deep freeze of winter that makes me think of people long ago who hoarded fragile produce as an offering to the sun god in hopes that it would give him strength to overcome the darkness and bring back spring. In our modern age, with our confidence in science and knowledge of the ways of nature, it doesn’t hurt to remember people who lacked such certainty yet paid greater attention to the world around them.

My favorite holiday meal:

Christmas dinner at our house is a far cry from the meal I grew up with. My mother used to serve a ham baked with pineapple slices and a brown sugar glaze. After the feast, the bone and remaining scraps of meat would go into a German-style split pea soup that would last us well into the new year.

Ham is not a big hit in my household today, so I make javaher polo instead, a Persian dish whose name means “bejeweled rice.” It may come from a culture that doesn’t celebrate Christmas, but I can think of no more festive dish to serve on a holiday table. The white rice sparkles with ruby-toned barberries, slivered green pistachios and creamy almonds, glistening orange peel, and a splash of golden saffron. No matter how much I prepare, this dish never lasts as long as my mother’s pea soup did, but paired with a roast chicken and served with a glass of sparkling wine, it looks and tastes just like Christmas should.

My favorite holiday decoration:

I may not deck the halls with boughs of holly or my house with garlands of lights, but my one nod to the neighborhood decorating frenzy is that I hang an evergreen wreath on my front door. I love wreaths of all kinds – herbal ones in the summertime, fragrant with mint, lavender, and thyme. Fruit wreaths in the fall as a tribute to bountiful harvests. A circle is such a comforting shape, with no beginning and no end.

My favorite family tradition:

Throughout the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I slice up a Christstollen, a dense German cake filled with dried fruit and almonds and iced with melted butter and powered sugar. Arranged on a special plate along with a few decorative rosemary sprigs (which are usually putting out their tiny blue blossoms at this time of year), it makes a sweet addition to breakfast.

This tradition started many years ago with a crotchety old aunt of mine. She lived in Dresden, a German city that at the time lay well behind the Iron Curtain in the German Democratic Republic. This aunt despised my mother (and, by extension, my sister and me) and never wasted an opportunity to criticize everything we did, from the way we dressed (not fashionably Parisian enough – and this from a dyed-in-the-wool Communist) to where we lived (in the decadent heart of Capitalism). But she saved up her kindness for one act of generosity at Christmas, when she’d send us an authentic Dresdner Christstollen, purchased from a famous bakery whose holiday confections were intended only for export. You had to have serious political connections to buy one in its city of origin.

The pastry arrived in a metal box with a picture of a medieval city sketched on the side, and it took metal cutters, a hammer, and a chisel to pry the container open. But the treat inside, a gift from one of the most unpleasant people I’ve ever encountered, always reminded me that everyone, no matter how nasty they may be, has the capacity for kindness. Isn’t that what the holidays are all about?

Festival of Pomegranates and Watermelon

Tomorrow is the winter solstice, an event that Iranians call Shabeh Yalda (or the night of the sun god’s birth). The roots of Yalda go back thousands of years to Mithraism and this ancient religion’s belief in the struggle of good against evil. The longest night of the year was said to belong to the forces of evil, and it was the time when the sun god Mithra (also known as Mehr) emerged into the world to fight the dark powers of Ahriman.

Centuries later, the Zoroastrians refined the tradition and turned it into a two-day ritual. The solstice, with its long hours of darkness, belonged to Ahriman, who manifested his evil by creating chaos in the world. So on this day, the ancient Persians turned their society inside out: servants lorded it over their masters, children had authority over their parents, and the king would dress in plain white robes and mingle with his subjects. I see this as a kind of baiting game. If Mithra thinks that Ahriman is winning, won’t he fight all the harder?

The second day of Yalda, known as khoreh rooz, or day of the sun, belonged to Mithra/Mehr, and the fact that it arrived at all was proof that light had vanquished the dark.

The religious meaning of Yalda has been lost in modern times, but it’s still a good excuse for a party. People get together with friends to celebrate and dance through the night. But like everything else in Persian culture, the symbolism of the tradition lives on.

People eat fresh fruit , especially watermelon and pomegranates, as a reminder that the cold, bleak days of winter will pass and bring summer around again. Tradition also has it that consuming watermelon on the winter solstice will keep illness away. Pomegranates represent the crimson color of dawn, a prediction that light will banish the dark, and the days are growing longer. Ajil, a mixture of nuts and dried fruit, symbolizes prosperity and holds winter famine at bay.

My husband has childhood memories of his family sitting around the corsi, a low table covered in blankets with a brazier burning underneath. They’d eat the auspicious foods, read poetry, especially the work of the 14th century Iranian poet Hafez, and tell stories all through the long night.

So while everyone around me gears up for Christmas, I’ve been busy gathering the season’s bounty for Shabeh Yalda—and feeling like a squirrel collecting my winter’s hoard. I like to mix up the seasons, so my fruit bowl has watermelon, pears, apples, oranges, persimmons, and pomegranates. I’ve liberated the last of our Iranian pistachios from their hiding place (pistachios from Iran last a nanosecond around here). These I’ve tossed with California almonds, Iranian walnuts, dried mulberries, black raisins, and a handful of cranberries for color.

I like to mix up traditions, too. So a plate of German Christmas Stollen and the last roses from the garden go on the table next to the fruit bowl. And lastly, for a Zoroastrian touch, I add two candles and a small bowl of rosewater to reflect the candlelight.

I’ve taken our copy of Hafez’s Divan down from the shelf and placed it with the fruit arranged on the table. On Shabeh Yalda, we’ll get together with a few friends, munch on the fruit and nuts, and read Hafez. And we’ll tell stories throughout the long night.

What about you? Do you celebrate the winter solstice, and if so, what traditions do you practice?