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Vice Blog

NEW YORK - RAISED PAGAN


Fuck Halloween. Winter Solstice, the longest day of darkness, is the real Pagan goth's holiday, and it's happening this Sunday. Our friend Adriane Schramm explains this holy day as remembered from her childhood.
What would Christmas be like without Winter Solstice? If you ask my dad (that's him and my mom up there in that photo, by the way), he'd tell you that actually Christmas wouldn't even exist. The Christians were jealous of all the partying the Pagans were up to so they stole the winter hoedown idea. They lied about Jesus's b-day, added on the irresistible allure of more presents than you will ever see all year, introduced miracles and a charitable, roundy mysterion heard through the walls creeping and howling. Basically, they revolved an entire year and worthwhile earthly human existence around one single day. Tight agenda there. So the Christians stole the celebration, and the Pagan solstice party got a little dull and dingy ever since. There was no competition! Pagans lost a lot of the raging that kept the celebration sexy. To this day, the Solstice looks humdrum and healthy, rather than trippy, naked, and pilly. Good thing some of the hooded and cloaky crept into secret corners and kept the original celebration lit.

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My mom and dad maintained the Winter Solstice rituals throughout my childhood and my brother and I still give each other Solstice gifts. (It was never as much fun as a fire dance though, which for some reason were really popular in West Virginia, where I'm from.) We all would sit in a tiny candle-lit circle as my mom presented each of us kids with little sun necklaces, which we wore for the duration of the party, about an hour. My dad wore the biggest sun necklace, an imprinted clay medallion on a leather strap, a heavy, pendulous symbol of his position as patriarch and not without an under-whiff of a Scorpio swinger.

He would remain respectfully silent while my mother delivered her snappy and poetic sermon rife with symbolic reference to her existence as a child of the sun. She could project like Vincent Price. Her eyebrows would rise as her voice got bottomless and low. By candlelight, her eyes looked like the bottom of a bubble tea with those googly balls. My brother and I were often restless and fidgety, the sun necklace always tight and pinching, but there were promises of gifts so we attempted to remain calm.

When she was done my Dad would present the science behind the phenomenon of having more daylight using an instruction wand with a tiny sun taped to its end and a cardboard poster displaying the earth's rotation path. The grinny sun face wore bushy eyebrows and bared friendly teeth. Dad would always get a little bristly when recounting the Christian thieving of the Pagan holidays. We drank orange juice and munched sun cookies throughout the service.

Our presents were always scientific and often useful tools for being anti-Christians: compass, magnifying glass pen, edible plant identification manual, rock and mineral samples, a gold coin, thesaurus, first-aid kit, and invisible ink. But one year my brother got a smoke machine. I believe this was a symbolic gift from my dad, that the raging psychedelic return of the Winter Solstice party was his ultimate legacy.

ADRIANE SCHRAMM