I don’t know about you, but for me, October through December is the best time of the year. Sure, students like me have to study hard for midterm exams, but we get Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa (and for me, my birthday!!) in this span of time. We’re also in the beautiful transition between golden, glittering autumn and frozen, silver winter. In my opinion, there is no better time of the year.

As you can see, I have changed my header image of this website to something a bit more festive. I usually get excited for Christmas, which is just a few days before my birthday, at around the beginning of the month, but it’s not until about now that I start feeling really festive, and all I can think about is Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, as I’m sure most of my peers are as well.

But besides being the most thrilling and joyous time of the year for me, it has also intrigued me very much. Why is it, I wonder, that a lot of the most gorgeous, brilliant and shimmering holidays all occur in the same small sliver of the year? What was going through those people’s minds, all those years ago, that encouraged them to create these holidays in the incipient days of winter? I think it was the natural shortening of days, but I’m not sure. I believe that they made these holidays to celebrate the light in the days when the night was expanding. We humans are like moths – inexplicably drawn towards things that glimmer and sparkle with hope and purity. You can translate light into whatever it means to you, but as a species, we’ve always been attracted to the alluring brightness of the things we can’t explain. What really is ‘light’? What does ‘light’ really look like, if we could see it and not just the things it touches?

We may never know, and the constantly curious may never be content. But although we do not know what light, or life, or anything really is, I, for one, am happy with the sight of light’s work – glittering tree ornaments, jewels and sequins, vivid nature, and everything else this mysterious thing has brought us.