There is one thing I do, every year for over a decade now. It is nothing I ever read about -- it simply felt right with all the symbolism, and also my own personality makeup (for those who do any work with astrology, my "trinity" is all of the fall quadrant -- sun in Sagittarius, moon in Scorpio, Libra rising. This is my time of year altogether, and I trust my instincts).
I prepare the kitchen -- in my tiny apartment, my "hearth" is the top of the stove -- and clean carefully. I choose a votive candle, the four-day, tall kind, in a sun color -- orange, or red, or dark golden yellow (pale yellow doesn't seem to do it). Fortunately sun color votives are always available. After dark on the night of the 31st I simply light it and stay by it for a while, meditating, thinking about my dead and the turning of the year toward the dark.
It is a vigil. The impulse is completely to do with the symbolism of being a guardian or a preserver or a keeper of the light during the darkest of the year, while the sunlight hours are waning day by day. There is an element of pregnancy about it -- the flame within the clear glass. All through the time between Samhain and Yule I light one votive from the last, without letting the fire go out. (It's tricky with tall candles that have burned low in glass -- the best thing I have found is long incense sticks soaked with oil or melted candle wax on the end, to transfer a strong flame to the new candle from the bottom of the old glass.)
At Yule, after dark, I transfer the flame of the last votive to a tall, thick, open pillar candle, not in glass any more. It is always red. I may try to have some sprays of holly around it. But the important thing is that the fire is out in the open -- the sun has turned, the light is born and out in the open day. To transfer the flame, I use a tall white taper, not the incense stick, and the taper burns in its own holder standing next to the red pillar. I have a frosted glass holder that suggests an elemental female form, that I use just for the white candle.
In the days when I was growing chili peppers, my seed peppers for the next spring's crop would rest with the candle, in a tiny primitive Mexican clay cup. The flame banked low, the sun sleeping in the seed of fire, surrounded by earth. Again -- it felt instinctively correct. The strongest placement in my astrological chart is Mars in Capricorn on an angle (the nadir), and the symbolism of fire protected and controlled by earth is rock-basic to me.
And that's it. Most years I make it all the way without "dropping" the flame from Samhain to Yule. Once in a while it goes out while I am transferring it. It's disappointing, but I light it again from the stove and keep going. It is in carrying the light forward that the meaning lies, and in all humility I have to say sometimes I do drop the light. We all do. But we can all relight it.
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Hello,