The mother nights of the holidays

Celebrating labor, birth and mother ancestors

It never landed with me what we’re actually celebrating on Christmas…until I was nine months pregnant.

Two Christmas eve’s ago I was round as an ornament and just a few weeks away from my due date. It was a tender, emotional time. There was so much that was unknown. When would labor start? How would the birth go? What would my life be like on the other side?

I often woke up in the middle of the long night and couldn’t go back to sleep, wondering about this vulnerable change that was afoot and praying to the stars winking outside in the deep dark night.

Growing up, we celebrated a lot of different holiday mythologies, including the story of Jesus’ birth. And yet it was always the backdrop to the holiday—lost like wallpaper among the flashier excitement of Santa Claus and elves.

Then, I was pregnant on Christmas— and the story took root in me like a tree, like a child nestled beneath my ribs. I understood it in a way I never did before.

Once a year, on one of the longest nights, we celebrate and hold vigil for the tender holiness of a mother giving birth.

A mother, her labor waves already begun, legs turned to water, walking door-to-door until someone gave her refuge.

A mother, surrendering entirely to the animal of her body as she moaned among the warm flanks of horses and ewes.

A mother, awake in the long night bringing a child down like a star into this world.

It touched me profoundly, changing the way I saw this holiday forever.

In a culture and a time when a mother’s body and a mother’s mysteries are often swept into a corner—there is still a night when we remember the holiness of her. Of her swaying, singing, crying, laboring. Of her delivering a new beginning in this world.

Christmas is a celebration of a woman giving birth.

And yet it’s not the first time we’ve associated these holy days of darkness and the rebirth of the light with the mother’s body.

In the ancient Anglo-Saxon calendar December 20^th was celebrated as Mōdraniht, or “Mother’s Night”. The official beginning of Yule, a twelve-day festival, Mother’s Night was a time to honor the female ancestors of your line. The women who gave birth to those who gave birth to you. A whole lineage of women swaying in the long night.

And then there’s Saint Lucia’s day on December 13^th, where across Scandinavia young girls wear crowns of candles and usher back in the light with their maidens and star boys trailing behind.

The Solstice itself, long associated with a literal rebirth of the light, has often been a time of honoring the mother-body, the mother-led delivery of the light. Like the Egyptian Goddess Isis giving birth to Horus. Or the Japanese sun Goddess Amaterasu, emerging again from the cave after healing from trauma (an emergence that is prompted by another Goddess flashing her vulva through a crack in the walls, causing Amaterasu so much mirth she feels safe enough to come back into this world).

Or Beiwe, the ancient Reindeer Goddess of the Sami, who brings the sun back from it’s southernmost point on the horizon, carrying it in her antlers to rebirth the world.

There’s a truth here, a deep one, one I hold close to my heart.

On the longest nights of the year, when mystery takes root like seeds in the dark, when uncertainity is at high tide, and the depths of what we grapple with seem to flood our life—she is there.

The one who gave birth to us. The one who holds us still. The one who is Earth, who is mother on her knees in a manager, who is sunlight touching our faces, who is Goddess with candles in her hair.

The one who comes to us in the long night to say everything will be alright.

The holidays are many things, but perhaps what we need most out of these days, is for them to be what they’ve always been— mother nights.

Nights when we’re held, when we’re reassured, when no matter what we’re surviving through, we’re shown that there’s light on the other side.

So whatever you’re holding right now, whatever you’re preparing, planning, cleaning or baking this Christmas eve—may you take a moment today to honor yourself, to feel yourself being honored. For all that you’ve born into this world. For the body you inhabit. For the love you pour, like sunlight, into your family, into this earth.

For all the nights you’ve lived through, all the mornings you’ve seen dawn.

Because you are as precious as a woman kneeling in manager. As a star on the horizon. As the sun emerging again from tree-dark horizon.

And this mother night is a celebration of you.

An instrumental version of one of my favorite nativity songs. Check out the lyrics (adapted from the poem by the English poet Christina Rossetti) if you want to be moved by a story of mother- birth that is at the heart of this holiday.