Io Saturnalia!

Amici et amicae, I want to take a brief moment on this fourth day of Saturnalia to once again wish you a happy round of winter festivities.  Tonight being the start of winter, it seems an especially auspicious time to both commemorate and briefly contemplate this end of year season.  In cosmic terms, of course, the eccentricity of the Earth's rotation is a relatively minor affair, and indeed even on our own sphere its significance is hardly universal (Southern hemisphere shoutout!)

Ain't no party like a Saturnalia party

Of course, pedantry about astronomical phenomena is never a good reason to call off  a party.  And I am in favor of any occassion that serves as a reminder  that every darkness must fade again into light.  Judging from the Christmas lights I can see from my window, most of my neighbors are in agreement with this sentiment.  Yet being the pagan that I am, there is something I find particularly attractive about Saturnalia.  Christmas (and its Hallmark-approved compatriot, Hanukkah) seem to me at least to be about the affirmation of the world order.  Insofar as there is anything out of the ordinary in these stories, it comes from the intervention of the divine into the human sphere through miracles and portents to right wrongs and put everything back on track for the divine plan.   Saturnalia, by contrast, was the time when all convention and order were overthrown.  Beggars became kings, masters waited on slaves, and drunkenness and carousing were the general rule.  

Say what you like, your family holiday get-togethers are probably still better than the Caesar's

There is something valuable, I think, about throwing our norms and seeing how much of the order we live by depends on convention.  If nothing else, it might serve as a nice bit of perspective for the high and mighty to see how the other half lives for a time.  Certainly, given the human propensity for being blind to one's own circumstances, perhaps it is too much to hope that one holiday can produce such a big change.  At the very least, though, something to ponder while we wait through the night for the dawn.