Current mood:

thoughtful

Shall we go to Stonehenge today?
No thanks!  Celt I might be and therefore more inclined towards this sort of thing but, even I, with my limited brain cells have been wondering, ever since I first went there, why I would walk away from something I wanted to see!  The sun rises in the east folks!  You walk up an avenue towards Stonehenge from the east and then . . .  you turn around to watch the sun rise?!!!  It doesn't make sense!  If I was around when Stonehenge was built I would see no substantial reason to celebrate mid-summer other than that it was part of the calendar of their year.  Also, to celebrate sunrise would seem strange because of the alignment of the stones - simply because sunset works better and you get the impression that the setting sun was the object they were walking towards.

Of course, pure gut feeling plays a part in my appreciation of this place as well.  I'm from a farming family and in the middle of summer you were usually flat out trying to get your crops tended.  In the winter, however, it's a different story!  Then you wanted to celebrate the fact that you had arrived at the turning point for the year - the important one.  This is when the light begins to come back - not start to disappear again!  All farmers know that you need that light, and returning warmth, to grow your crops!  To my mind if Stonehenge was used for any celebration it would have been in winter because that is the point at which a community that had to provide its own food - no supermarkets - would have a reason to celebrate!  It is also the point when they would have had the time to celebrate!  I think I would appreciate the sun setting on the 21st December, which I would interpret to mean that 'Tomorrow the light begins to return!' far more than having a knees up to celebrate the high point of summer and the gradual return of the darkness!  Winter is the point in the year when I would be offering up prayers and what have you to the gods in order to ensure that the annual cycle kept on going and that spring really was going to arrive again!

Another farming point to bear in mind is that animal production was on a very natural scale.  The stock had not been bred to produce year-round food and so the young arrived when nature intended, when their food would be plentiful, and not when man decided the matter.  The stock had food for the summer but when the winter arrived it was a different matter.  The communities, of that time, would have kept what they could manage to feed and would have ate the rest and if you decide to munch your way through a large concoction of fresh meat in the middle of summer you would have been barmy!  You would also waste at least four good months of animal fodder that would have been out their in the natural landscape for them to chomp their way through!  For example - pigs love acorns and they don't fall off the trees in the middle of June!   If you kill stock in the middle of summer there are various points to bear in mind.  The heat would turn the meat off very quickly, the young stock would have been smaller than their optimum kill weight and you would not have been able to preserve the dead animal so well.  In winter,  the animal would have more flesh for you to eat so you could feed more people from it and it would be easier to preserve the carcass in the lower temperatures. 

Of course, this is just my own personal theory but  I would still rather celebrate in the winter than the summer because that is when I can see a reason for doing it. 

However, there are a lot of people today who wish to celebrate mid-summer and good luck to 'em - just don't write my name on the invitation card!