Light a candle for Christmas

Christmas Day is past, yet the glow may still be lighting certain corners of our lives.

The thought struck me a couple of days ago, “Candles are an important part of Christmas, from cultural tradition even if not part of the original story.”

Wise sayings cluster around the use of candles: “Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness”; “How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” When Shakespeare said this, naughty meant worthless.

Many churches have discovered that the lighting of Advent candles the four Sundays of the season is a meaningful way to think about the anticipated events.

One scholarly source of background concerning the winter festival which for us is Christmas and for the Roman was the Saturnalia, says, “…the abundant presence of candles (symbolized) the quest for knowledge and truth.”

Their value isn’t always symbolic or philosophical. Candles sometimes prove their practical value all over again when the lights go out and don’t come back on for hours or days.

Do we always have at least one candle within easy reach for such times? Can we find it in the dark?

If so, do we always know where the matches are, too? Neither one is much good without the other.

A couple of slim, tall candles, red, green or white tapers, in home-décor language, and a sprig of evergreen make a no-fail centerpiece which is sure to evoke memories and set the mood for festivities.

Candles in various colors and sizes and all kinds of combinations give a house a kind of beauty which is hard to achieve any other way.

Just looking around the rooms I live in, I see a very slim and tall candle which probably came from some formal setting, unusual as the size is.

Someone has inserted its tiny base into a small hole in a flat piece of wood, the simplest of all possible candleholders and not the safest. It looks top-heavy, all half an ounce of it.

Standing next to it is a three-inch stub of a plain white candle, perhaps salvaged from some church after the Christmas Eve candlelight service. It needs a holder. I hope no one lights it till it finds one.

On a window sill nearby are three candles. The mate to the maverick candle stands in an ornate brass holder like Wee Willie Winkie’s in the classic Mother Goose illustrations.

Another candle is deep red, extremely fat, probably as fat as candles can get, and it has three wicks. For a holder, this one needs something like a pedestal cake plate.

The third candle also is red. It is in a nice apothecary jar which will eventually be useful in the kitchen to hold sugar or flour or coffee.

A pleasant substitute for a fire in the fireplace is a cluster of candles of various heights and perhaps various colors. When burning, they light up a dim corner, without making the room hot.

One little girl loved above all things everything having to do with Christmas.

In her view, putting up the Christmas tree any later than Thanksgiving week-end was putting it up far too late in the season.

She visited her grandmother’s house around that time of year and gravely reproached Grandma for not having any lights up yet.

“Grandma, you should have lights up outdoors, and you should have a candle in every window.”

Never mind that Grandma’s house was so old that she was lucky to have even one electrical outlet in each room. Of course there were none at all on the porch or outdoors.

Yes, Christmas without candles is possible, yet we all would miss their warmth, their glowing light, and the way they beautifully relieve the darkness of the shortest days of the year.