The Daily: 10 December 2025

Today is the Republican Roman festival of Lux Mundi. Saturday is the feast day of Santa Lucia. This is a time to celebrate light.

Lux Mundi translates into “the light of the world”. This day honored Libertas, the bringer of light. Libertas was the personification of freedom, metaphorical light rather than actual light, and she is invoked in the struggle for sovereignty. Libertas was the torch that led France to overthrow the monarchy.

Saturday’s feast day celebrates a saint and elder deity who is the embodiment of hope, Lucia, the dawn bringer. Lucia also means light, but she brought food to those hiding from oppression in the catacombs and those who were trapped by winter’s darkness. Her symbol is a crown of lit candles.

We equate light with goodness and dark with indifference if not evil. Light guides us. Darkness confuses and leads us astray. I think these metaphors only work where there is deep winter darkness. Short days of weak warmth and long cold nights make darkness a threat. In more tropical latitudes, darkness is sought out for the cool relief it brings. Darkness is sheltering and restful. Darkness is time for romance. But not in regions that brush the poles. Darkness is death in the high latitudes. It is sleep without awakening. It is terror.

Our metaphorical language is colored by the northern seasons, where winter is darkness and darkness is dangerous. I never fully appreciated why darkness was so wrong in English. I come from one of those places where you seek out the cool shade and are enlivened by the relief of sunset. Darkness is calming and restorative in New Mexico. Light is harsh and unforgiving. A summer’s day is more likely to deal death in the desert than a winter’s night. (Though it does get cold in New Mexico and you don’t want to be without shelter in January darkness.) But living here in Vermont, where winter’s sunset is a bit after 4pm, where the sun never fully heats the cold walls of the house, where the darkness is deadly and lasts for over fifteen hours a day many weeks around the solstice, this has made me understand the metaphors.

In my part of the world, the earliest sunsets of the year began a week ago. Next Tuesday, the sun will set a minute later, though sunrise will continue to drift a wee bit later into the morning until well after the solstice. But day length does not change very much for the rest of the month, and each day feels fleeting. The sun is westering as I am taking my lunch break. It’s good to remember that the solstice is in eleven days and the light will begin to grow again.

At various points in history, the solstice would have fallen at around this date, and these bright deities used to bring an end to the growing darkness. For us, that midpoint in winter’s dormancy comes in eleven days, but it’s close — and we really won’t see much change between now and then. The light is no longer dying. Soon it will begin to grow again. And that does feel both hopeful and a bit like freedom, though we have quite a bit of winter’s incarceration left. For winter is half over.

Focus on that in these dark days… the darkness will lift.

Here is a poem I wrote for Santa Lucia, or, as she is known in the north, Lusi…

fair lusi, aurora, ostara
dawn-treader, day-bringer
slips on silent star-song
into sudden symphony of light
eternal march winds springing
winging through winter’s long night
she releases the riotous rainbow 
spreading seeds o’er fallow fields
frail lilies flowing in floral wake
follow her footsteps into morning 
she brings the golden sun
roaring radiant renewal
oriental splendor rising in revelation
dispersing diaphanous dreams of darkness
in radiant kaleidoscopic clarity
fair lady spring
bring us this gladdening
balmy climes to calm cold grieving
leaving harsh white skies
in darkened past
harkening fast to rapturous trilling
thrilling murmuration of flourishing life
give us your immutable gifts
undying return
and whirling ring of days
grant your immortal grace
to face what men have made
in this black winter’s bleak shadow

I was down in Brooklyn over the weekend. A new annual tradition for my family is to go see the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Lightscape. Here are some pictures…

And then there is the SD Ireland cement mixer. Every Yuletide the Vermont-based construction company SD Ireland covers a cement mixer with lights. (I’m pretty sure it’s bright enough to be seen from space…) Then they trundle around northern Vermont in the dark evenings, bringing sparkle and smiles to every neighborhood. If you hear a repeated blurt of a truck horn on some night in December, go outside (or, this year, look out the window… because it’s -14°F out there right now). The mixer will be rolling by soon.

I can hear it honking downtown… Like an excitable kid waiting for Santa Claus, I’m watching the windows to see if they drive by my house.

The Wednesday Word

for 10 December 2025

lustrous

What does lustrous mean to you? Think about it. If you’d like, send me a quick poem or story… or just a few thoughts. If you really have something organized to say, maybe enter my Wednesday Word contest on AllPoetry.

©Elizabeth Anker 2025