Serendipity and the Solstice

Today my stepson and I began a new family tradition. We made hand dipped bayberry candles to burn on the Solstice. We had a lot of fun, and the little guy was amazed at how the candles seemed to grow visibly with each dip. We made a half dozen tonight, which will be plenty for us for the holiday season, although I'm thinking of making another half dozen as gifts to give to friends.

Bayberry candles burnt at this time of year apparently were once quite a popular tradition as there are several versions of a little ditty that is often recited as part of the lore of the bayberry. So far I've found about four different versions, but I forgot to copy down the last one I read, so here are three:

"This bayberry candle comes from a friend
so on Christmas eve burn it down to the end.
For a bayberry candle burned to the socket,
will bring joy to the heart and gold to the pocket."

or

"Bayberry candles burned to the socket,
puts luck in the home, food in the larder, and gold in the pocket."

or

"A bayberry candle burned to the socket
brings food to the larder and gold to the pocket."

At any rate, from the little snippets above it is clear that burning one as a holiday tradition certainly isn't going to hurt anything! Since bayberry candles made half and half with beeswax have a wonderful aroma and burn far longer and cleaner than bayberry wax alone, we added some lovely fresh beeswax to our dipping pot. The finished candles are hanging here near my desk, and ohhhhh, do they smell good. I keep taking the bundle down from their peg every few minutes to enjoy the scent.

So, here comes the serendipitous part...

Since my dipping pot is really just an empty spaghetti sauce can that's been cleaned out and re-purposed, our home-dipped candles weren't terribly long - only about six inches. That meant that they are also a bit narrower than commercial candles, since having candles that short but as fat as most commercial tapers would have looked a bit silly. So I decided to look through my candlestick collection for a holder that would hold a slightly narrower taper. I found two such holders already in decorative use on the mantle - a pair of brass calla lily candlesticks I bought a couple of years ago simply because I liked they way they looked.

As I was cleaning them up and polishing away the year's accumulation of tarnish, something in the back of my mind seemed to recall some sort of interesting calla lily lore I had run into earlier this year while researching something else that had caught my attention. So I did what I always do - I googled it - and here's what I found...

"The Calla Lily was the flower that the early Romans used to mark the passage of the winter solstice. The Romans planted the Calla Lily just inside the portal to their homes, timing it to bloom for winter solstice and giving the effect of bringing the light indoors during the darkest days of the year."

So my calla lily candlesticks have a bit more going for them than the fact that they fit the tapers we dipped tonight! And, I learned something interesting as well to pass along to the rest of the crew the night we light them to help guide back the sun.