Imbolc Eve

Now everybody's been asking why we can't "just celebrate Candlemas like everyone else" tomorrow. Why, the Beaker People have been asking, can't we just light some candles and have another happy Christmassy thought about the Baby Jesus? What's with instead celebrating an ancient British festival that has some indefinable connection to the reproductive cycle of sheep?

To which I normally reply "because." I know some think that's an unacceptable answer but really it seems to work for me. It's short, for a start. Which frees up my time for other purposes.

But I do have some other reasons why. So I'd like to list them now. Then if all Beaker People could print themselves the list off and have a read they won't need to ask me. Maybe if this works, we can have them laminated (the copies of the list, not the Beaker People) and you can all keep them for next year.

The first is the answer to "Everybody else does it." Would you do everything that everybody else does? If you did you'd be calling for Fred the Shred, now he's been de-Sir-Fred-ed, to be beheaded as well. Which, to be fair, some of you are. But Drayton Parslow doesn't celebrate Candlemas because it has "-mas" in it. Although, strangely, he does celebrate Christmas. (And have you noticed it's less than 11 months away? I can't wait!)

The second is that the Feast of the Presentation of the Little Baby Jesus in the Temple is just a modern, liberal re-naming. The older name, the Purification of the Virgin Mary, tells us more about the inherent beliefs involved here. As is well known our ancestors (or at least those of our ancestors who were celibate and therefore were allowed to be the priests, vicars and bishops who ran the place) thought all sex was bad. Which was why I am now reflecting that they probably weren't our ancestors after all, and maybe it was just the other people who were our ancestors. That's the trouble when you start generalising about stuff you don't understand - you end up writing stuff that sound good but is actually drivel.

Where was I? Right. So if even Mary, who'd not had sex, had to undergo the rite of Purification, then clearly the whole business of reproduction was deeply flawed in those days, and a way to subjugate women. And that's too hard a thought for me to "unpack" right now. So I'll just assure you that it's a fact and that's why we're not celebrating Candlemas.

The second reason (or third, if you count both the first two) is that it's a shiny, candle-y kind of event. And yet this is the day we find out that the baby in Mary's arms is going to cause all kinds of upset, and Mary grief as well. And frankly it's just after Christmas, I've just paid the credit card bill and the weather's freezing solid and I don't think I can take any more sadness. The world's hard enough already. If it were just nice pictures of Baby Jesus, that we could project on the screen while playing Kendrick's Like a Candle Flame on ukulele and ocarina - fine. But all this growing up and dying horribly - not in February.

So tomorrow we're celebrating the ancient British festival of Imbolc. We don't know anything about it, so I can inform you that it's a happy kind of celebration. We will light some candles and drink the special Imbolc Cider we brewed last autumn and we'll play a happy video of baby lambs skipping through attractive but unthreateningly small amounts of new-fallen snow.

And we've a special dinner later. I thought roast lamb with all the trimmings would be appropriate. Or, for vegetarians, all the trimmings.