Today is the festival of Santa Lucia. It always felt very whimsical and strange to me that her lovely Sicilian name and tradition is celebrated by the Scandinavians without anglicizing it to “Saint Lucy” or whatever the Swedish version is. As a teenager, I played the very traditionally-Italian-sounding song on the piano from Victorian sheet music, and it was the same version played and sung at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, where I attended confirmation class in eighth grade.
We weren’t members of the congregation, as my mother wasn’t religious and didn’t take my sisters and me to church. But when I was thirteen, the intense drive to be with my classmates outside of school made me beg to be allowed to enroll in confirmation class, at the church where my childhood friend Jennie Carlson’s family attended.
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My last name is Peterson. Growing up in Rockford, Illinois, I barely even noticed that my friends’ last names were Anderson, Carlson, Engstrom, Lundquist, and so on, and that three of the neighbors on my block were named Johnson. My father grew up in Rockford in the house his grandfather August Peterson built, and his next-door neighbors were also named Peterson. If it’s not obvious yet, Rockford was heavily settled by Swedes who got off the train there in the late nineteenth century instead of going all the way to Minneapolis. During the exact same era, Sicilians and other immigrants from Italian regions were settling Rockford, all drawn by the growing factory jobs of the machine-tool industry.
What this meant to me in the intense social crucible of eighth grade one hundred years later was that all of the cool kids were either going to CCC at Holy Family Catholic Church, or confirmation class at St. Mark’s Lutheran. Before we were old enough to drive in a farm town with no public transportation, too spread out to bike everywhere, it was essential to find a way to get in the mix outside of school hours. Or come Monday morning, I’d be sipping a cup of cold FOMO about whatever drama went down with the fascinating rich kids who went to Eisenhower or Keith Country Day instead of Woodrow Wilson Middle School. Almost all kids seemed like rich kids to me if they had two parents instead of one, or possessed a home with elegant attributes I dreamed of, like a pantry, walk-in closet or a window seat. And even in the late 1980s, I seemed to be one of the only kids with divorced parents. My family naturally didn’t belong to one of the country clubs and we lived so far out on the edge of town, there was no hope of me crossing paths with an interesting peer on my block or at the far-away YMCA on a weekend. So confirmation class seemed like the most exciting society mixer in the world, with its promise of overnight “lock-ins” and summer camp in Lake Geneva.
I was an obvious outsider when I showed up for class, not really there to become a Christian so much as part of the in crowd. All the church kids knew exactly who had been around since kindergarten Sunday school, and I was an interloper. Fortunately, I did have the right last name. That would open certain doors in Rockford. Trying to get a table for brunch on a Sunday at the Stockholm Inn? Being named Peterson will help you.
My entrée into the Lutheran adolescent social circle unfolded exactly as I planned, with my mom or grandmother dropping me off at St. Mark’s asphalt parking lot for a few hours of blissfully unsupervised networking. Well, we were supervised by a predictably slightly-creepy but fun youth pastor. But without the matching mom-and- dad bookends that most kids always had in tow, I blended in better than I ever had before. I felt I was finally one of the crowd. Until December.
The traditional evening service in tribute to Santa Lucia was THE event of the holiday season, held near the saint’s day of December 13, the day of the solstice and the longest night in the old Julian calendar. What it meant to the confirmation class was that one lucky girl among us would be chosen to represent Santa Lucia, to wear the candlelit crown and a white robe to walk slowly down the aisle for the peak moment of the service. Every one of us expected the honor to go to one of the longtime congregation family girls, probably blonde. It was the late eighties, and we were all obsessed with California beach girls in neon Body Glove maillots, tanning beds and Sun-In. I probably had my first third-degree blistering sunburn that summer. I had long, dark, recently permed hair and I definitely wasn’t one of the Bergstrom daughters or whoever, baptized as a baby, whose beehive-coiffed grandmother brought a plate of her famous saffron lüssekatter to the after-service gathering in the paneled church basement.
When it was my name called to serve as Santa Lucia at class before that weekend’s service, every head swiveled and every jaw dropped. I’ll never know if it was truly the luck of the draw, or if the youth pastor deliberately chose the outsider to avoid a fistfight among the congregation girls. What I did know is I had suddenly become the belle of the winter ball. I spent the rest of the week walking on a pink cloud of delight, banging out my theme song on the piano at home in anticipation of my spotlight moment. That night went completely according to plan, and I’m sure the St. Mark’s register failed to record that a walk-on nobody (at least, thank God, a Peterson) stole the show at the pinnacle soirée of the 1988 season.
I was already a budding astrologer at thirteen, a natural sun-worshiper and a witch since babyhood. But I didn’t know that the Catholic Sicilian’s saint’s festival had merged with the Norse pagan tradition of a malevolent female spirit named Lussi, who enforced darkness at the solstice and made animals speak. Her name sounds like Lucia, who brings light in the darkness, as well as Lucifer, the light-bringer, often associated with Venus when she is the morning star. Venus is also associated with the number thirteen, today’s date and the day of the solstice in the old pagan days.
Though astrology is basically the art of intentionally decorating time, I never stop being astonished by the seemingly accidental synchronicities of time, place, and astrology. I am a Libra, Venus’ child, and I was chosen at thirteen to walk under a halo of candles in a dark sanctuary to celebrate the return of the light. That night in 1988, Venus was at the degree of my North Node of destiny. Tonight, the moon is in Venus-ruled Libra, and Venus is in her last shining days as the morning star, before becoming the evening star again after a spectacular conjunction with Mars and the Sun in early January. Tonight, I will be wearing a crown and a gown at a beautifully lit soirée in the Napa Valley, a place I insist is ruled by Venus without hard evidence, because of its beauty and because of the pink and lavender hues of the western ridge at sunset.
All hail Venus, bringer of the light.