Let There Be Light

It's no accident that the so much of our holiday-making right now concerns light - Christmas tree lights, Yule candles, firelight, starlight - for this is the turning point we know as the winter solstice, when light conquers darkness, days begin to lengthen and nights grow shorter, at least for us in the northern hemisphere. (The solstice was at 10:27pm on December 21st.) Our ancestors may not have known that the earth's north pole had begun tilting back toward the sun, but the prospect of returning light and warmth was a great cause for celebration. Even today, crowds gather at Stonehenge for the arrival of the solstice sun.

For some cultures, the solstice heralded the banishment of sun-averse demons and monsters, and not only in northern populations, whose mythology is full of hairy demons who flee back to underground caves as the days grow longer. Further south, in Greece, the kallikantzaros were angry demons who emerged during winter darkness to wreak havoc if not appeased with food left out for them. Most famously, the agricultural goddess Demeter mourned the loss of her daughter Persephone, captured by the underworld's Hades, causing winter's bleakness before Hades agreed to release Persephone for six months of each year, when light returned and crops could be sown.

La Befana takes to the Italian night skies

Solstice celebrations often involved gift-giving. The ancient Roman Saturnalia, in honor of their god of agriculture, took place over seven days in mid-December, when work was suspended, lavish feasting took place, homes were decorated with evergreens, and gifts were exchanged. And today, Italian children look out for La Befana, a witch-like fairy who takes to the late winter night skies on her broomstick, leaving candies and presents to reward the children for being good. Scandinavian children keep an eye out for the Tomte, a diminutive elfish figure who guards a farm's livestock and might turn ornery if he feels the animals are being mistreated. To stay on his good side, a bowl of porridge is left out for him on winter nights.

Today, we infuse our own holiday with light in both a physical and a spiritual sense and look forward, as our ancestors did, to the return of warmer, brighter times.

Happy holidays from all of us at SINHG!

FIRST ON THE WATER

Today may be "Black Friday" for many of us, the unofficial opening of the Christmas gift shopping season, but a less commercial designation also belongs to this day after Thanksgiving - Native American Heritage Day, proclaimed in 2008 by President George W. Bush to commemorate the role of pre-European peoples in shaping American history.

Here in the Lowcountry, evidence of pre-Colonial and prehistoric peoples are still present in the shell rings and middens scattered among the barrier islands (see our earlier post on shell rings), while more fragile traces of these early peoples are occasionally discovered, including a 4,000-year old dugout canoe found buried in the pluff mud of the Cooper River. As reported last year by the Post & Courier's Adam Parker, the canoe became a rallying point for Lowcountry and Upstate Native Americans from the Wassamasaw, Catawba, Waccamaw and Yemassee Indian Nations.

The canoe was discovered in 1997 by an amateur diver who illegally removed it before it was confiscated under state law and put into storage for nearly two decades before serious restoration efforts began at Clemson University's Warren Lasch Conservation Center in North Charleston (where the CSS Hunley is also undergoing preservation).

Members of the Yemassee Indian Nation touch part of their history, Photo courtesy The Post & Courier

Only fragments of the canoe remain, mostly pieces of its bow and stern, but even with these few pieces radiocarbon dating has yielded an age of about 4,200 years, known to archeologists as the Late Archaic period, contemporary with the dating of shell rings like Fig Island. Fashioned from a hollowed-out cypress log, the fragments show clear signs of scraping and firing to create a watercraft that was the common means of transportation for these early peoples, who migrated seasonally between the Upstate and the coast.

The preservation process will be a long one. The canoe has been residing in a trough of fresh water at the conservation center and is now soaking in a solution of glue-like polyethylene glycol to stiffen the wood, a process that can take up to a year to complete. The canoe will then be freeze-dried before consultations with southeastern Indian nations for a permanent and respectful display site. As Chief Lamar Nelson of the Eastern Cherokee, Southern Iroquois and United Tribes of South Carolina told the Post & Courier, "Any Native descendants in South Carolina, or North Carolina, could be related to the people who built that canoe."

THE NATIONAL BIRD

That's what Ben Franklin famously thought the turkey should be. It was, he wrote, "a much more respectable bird" than the eagle, which he considered to be "a rank coward". He thought the turkey to be "a true original native of America, and a bird of courage" that would willingly attack any grenadier of the British Guards who dared to invade his farm.

He was correct in thinking that the Tom turkey would aggressively protect itself, as many a stroller or golfer who has come too close to one can attest. But he was wrong in thinking that turkeys were native to the United States, although today they can be found in every state except Alaska. They were first encountered by 16th-century European explorers arriving in Mexico, where turkeys had been bred for centuries, making it one of only two birds native to the Americas (the other being the Muscovy duck). Imported to Europe and the Middle East, the birds reminded traders of the African guinea fowl that came to them along trade routes passing through Turkey, and thus came to be called "Turkey birds."

Although there is no reliable evidence that Pilgrims and Wampanoags ate turkey in November of 1621 (the Wampanoags provided deer meat, the Pilgrims brought "fowl", which were probably ducks or geese), turkeys were plentiful in the wild and a convenient addition to the traditional harvest feast tradition that the Pilgrims brought with them from Europe.

The bird that may be gracing your Thanksgiving table next week is a descendant of a millennia-long heritage, as fossil records from up to five-million years ago confirm. Although most consumer turkeys are farm-bred and raised, turkeys in the wild, as Franklin declared, are resourceful and agile. They can fly for short distances, with a flank speed of 50 miles an hour on the wing as they seek overnight roosts in trees. On the ground, they can run at 25 miles an hour when danger is sensed. They use their signature gobbles, that can be loud enough to be heard over a mile, to warn others of a threat; otherwise, the communicate with a series of clucks and purring noises. The poults that emerge from the hens' clutches of as many as eighteen eggs are up and foraging on their own within twenty-four hours and mature quickly, abandoned by the hen within a few days.

Lincoln proclaimed a national holiday of thanksgiving in 1863 as the Civil War neared its end, and presidents after him were presented with a turkey as a gift from the nation to mark the day. It wasn't until 1989 that President George H.W. Bush issued the first presidential pardon saving at least one turkey from the oven, a tradition observed by every president since.