Season of fire and candlelight

By Patricia Hunt
Published: November 21, 2008

I have a friend who suffers from seasonal affective disorder, a fancy name for feeling depressed on dark days; gloomy days produce gloomy thoughts in his mind. Intellectually I can understand this, but for me, gloom is an excuse to create fire. I want to light candles, set a fire in my wood-burning fireplace, and turn on the gas logs in the other fireplace. I love fire so much it is a wonder I am not an arsonist. I love campfires, candlelit services in churches and dinners at taverns in Colonial Williamsburg. I love the smell of wood smoke. Williamsburg during cold weather has wood fires along the sidewalks and wood burning in wire baskets attached to poles. I’m in hog heaven.

I have wondered if one reason modern life is so stressful is the presence of electric lights and absence of flame. Before Thomas Edison, if you had light in the dark, you had to have a flame. There were candles, oil lamps and later gas lamps, but you didn’t have light without fire. Then came the light bulb. It is great for lighting a room, but you have to admit there is no romance to it. No one ever stared at a light bulb, but I can stare at fire pretty nearly forever.

We humans used to order our days around nature’s day, the rising and setting of the sun. You had to slow down when the sun set, and you knew when that was going to happen. Today I can read the hours of sunrise and sunset in the weather section of the paper, but I can go for months without seeing either. I am only dimly aware of when this is occurring. We completely override the nature’s day and create our own. People couldn’t wait to get electricity so they could have the freedom to order their own day without having to be bound by whatever nature was up to, but I wonder if this trade was the devil’s bargain.

What would it be like to have permission to quit working because daylight was fading? What would it be like to live in a community of people who slowed down every day in unison, went into a lower gear, gathered together to eat and talk and drift toward nightfall and sleep? It is hard to imagine.

It is true that before electric lights, people feared darkness. If you read old prayers, they talk about the dangers of the night. Anyone who has stayed up all night with a sick child knows that even mild illness can seem life-threatening. Have you ever lain awake at 2 a.m. worrying, only to find that in morning’s light the situation looked less dire? There is something fearful about darkness, no denying it.

At the same time, light shining in darkness has been a symbol of hope and comfort across time and cultures. Regardless of what you may think about Thomas Kinkaid as an artist or one-man industry, he figured out that people are drawn to light shining in darkness. People have snapped up by the millions his pictures of little English-style cottages with light glowing in the windows. Now that such scenes are absent from real life, we buy pictures of them.

I’ve been known to turn off the classroom florescent lights and teach by candlelight. It is probably against fire codes, but you should see how it brightens up the spirits of students.

I suspect that for a lot of people, it is the aesthetics of Christmas they like, not the theology. It is candles and little lights on Christmas trees, the ubiquitous pictures of fireplaces and carolers standing beneath street lamps as snow falls that they are drawn to.

’Tis the season of fire and candlelight once again. Like a glass of good wine, it makes gatherings with relatives go down easier. We all look a little better if the lights are low. Gentle light can make us gentler. Maybe that is why we aggressive, competitive Americans have been buying candles at such a brisk pace in recent years. We long for their soft light to bring out the softness in us.

Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.