Today is the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere. Starting tomorrow, the darkness retreats and light advances. For centuries, humans have helped this process along by lighting bonfires, making noise and drinking.
All seems perfectly
reasonable to me.
One of the major bands
of my youth was Jethro Tull. JT went through about every stylistic metamorphosis
possible, from blues-rock to jazz-rock to folk-rock to progressive-rock to
hard-rock. Today’s Advent selection is from the folky phase, “Ring Out,
Solstice Bells”.
Although band frontman Ian Anderson wrote it in 1976, the lyrics definitely capture the centuries of celebration at the turning of the year, and it has a Renaissance exuberance to it.
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