Happy Winter Solstice

I’m going to go have a beer this evening with my friend Brian to celebrate the solstice. We generally get together for a pint this time of year, to note the days beginning to get longer. It’s dark early now, but getting brighter, which sounds pretty good to me.

Brian is of Celtic extraction (Irish), and I’m mostly Scandinavian (Svensk). A dozen centuries or so ago our peoples were more likely to be slashing or bashing each other with clubs and swords, or maybe shooting arrows at each other. So it’s a victory of sorts that our gatherings are more peaceable now.

I once sat down and calculated how many ancestors I had by generation, figuring about 25 years to a generation. I had 8 great-grandparents at 1900, so figured on 64 ancestors (give or take) at 1800, which is 512 in 1700 and 4096 in 1600 (let’s call it an even four thousand). That’d give me 32,000 ancestors in 1500 and 256,000 in 1400. That’s 2,048,000 in 1300 – did they even have two million Swedes in 1300? I’m guessing not – at any rate, I’m pretty sure they didn’t have 16 million (again, give or take) in 1200.

(It’s amazing how much time you have for this sort of foolishness in the dead of winter, isn’t it?)

I mention this because I figure the odds are pretty good our direct ancestors were among the combatants those many generations ago. Although I do want to point out the Swedes were generally traders, sailing down the Volga and Dnieper to trade in Black Sea ports. Traders, I say, more prone to honest bargaining than brutal piracy.

Many years ago I learned proofreading from a little old Norwegian lady from Wisconsin, named Betty Opheim, who wielded her red pencil over my head like a baseball bat. She taught me all manner of practical things I never learned in college, and I think of her to this day. We used to tell Norwegian/Swedish jokes together. The desks in our department were in a large office overlooking Market Street in SF and one day, looking wistfully out the window she said, “You know, they name sports team after them, and they glorify the Vikings now, but you know they were just a bunch of dirty pirates in a boat.”

“Your Norwegian ancestors, perhaps,” I joked.

But the truth is, according to a linguistics professor I once admired named Prof. Neil Snortum, any given boatload of Norse pirates had men from all over Scandinavia. It might be piloted by a Dane and his brother with a half dozen Danes and a dozen Norwegians and a few Swedes in the mix, and so on, but it wasn’t as cut and dried as national foreign relations can be today.

My point is, given the math, the odds are decent Brian and I have adversarial ancestors. Slashing, bashing and shooting away. So I take it as a sign of progress that we get together to buy each other pints of ale now, rather than killing each other, stealing each other’s money, or raping each other’s womenfolk. Given all the hostility in the world today, I’m open to all signs of progress.

We’ll each toast in ancestral fashion (I say skol, he says something about cilantro) and then chat about our jobs or lives or sports teams or politics. For a while we researched the old pagan festivals, but to be honest a lot of it seems a bit grim. The story of mistletoe is worth a smirk, but in general we’re averse to animal sacrifice, and human sacrifice can have such very bad legal consequences.

One year at Christmas Betty Opheim gave me a book inscribed “may all your pagan solstice festivals be white.” And I liked that. She was a smart, combative sort with a sharp tongue and wit. She’s gone now, and I hope more at peace where ever she is.

I hope you’re at peace, too – and may all your winter solstice festivals, whatever your beliefs, be merry.