November is all but over. December is just around the corner—ready and waiting, eager to get started.
This year’s iteration of Thanksgiving has come and gone. The day and events are now relegated to our memory’s scrapbook—one more shared feast celebrating our blessings with family and friends.
Even the piles of tasty leftovers that jam-packed our refrigerators have been consumed and enjoyed, including the final slice of pumpkin pie and the last dollop of cornbread dressing made from great-grandma’s recipe.
Time moves on.
“This time of year, life happens to you in a rush,” a friend said recently, lamenting the way everything always seems to shift into overdrive during these final few weeks.
Happily, there are other holidays and festivities in our immediate future. Between now and New Year’s Day, there are four-plus weeks of feasting and celebrating.
Christmas looms, coming down the pike like a runaway reindeer. Days are filled with seasonal tasks—decorating the tree and house, gift shopping, cooking. Moreover, this is the year’s pinnacle for home baking—an irresistible goldmine of cookies, pies, and delectable sweets—almost more than even a hardcore dessert addict can handle!
All the way through to New Year’s Day! At which point we bid adieu to 2023 and plunge headfirst into a brand new month and year.
Of course, months and years are only superficial devices—token divisions—for chopping up and tracking time’s fundamentally endless stream into tiny bite-size portions—though I don’t think the eternalness of this circular voyaging around the sun is a notion we fully grasp or understand. In fact, some insist time itself may be an illusion, a concept more for our acceptance—perhaps affording us a false sense of control, yet fundamentally meaningless in the grand mysterious scheme of reality.
Seasons take their turn, one after another, more or less adhering to schedule. Not in lockstep precision to our calendars and almanacs. You can’t force nature into such manmade boundaries. But loosely, the spring, summer, autumn, and winter continuum perpetuates, as solstices and equinoxes duly pass.
Even the stars heed the music of this slow, heavenly waltz.
November’s Full Beaver Moon is here, at its brightest peak. Over the next few nights, it will steadily disappear—waning, fading away. The following moon will be December’s Full Cold Moon. That new moon will start waxing on December 12, and shine full on the Day after Christmas—a luminescent silver-dollar disk amid the twelfth-month’s cold night.
When I was a boy, now is when my father would invariably look up at the night sky, pointing and reiterating the names and sometimes recounting the ancient background stories of the twinkling constellations. Orion, the Hunter; Canis Major and Canis Minor, the Great Dog Star and his companion, the Little Dog Star; Cassiopeia, the Queen; the Seven Sisters, part of the Pleiades; Taurus the Bull; Auriga the Charioteer; and the Gemini Twins.
Our celestial starting point was always the same: “Show me the North Star, Sonny,” Dad would say.
He’d begun teaching me to visually navigate my way around the heavens from the time I could walk—maybe even before. I clearly remember the question getting asked as I was being carried in my father’s arms as we crossed the short distance between where he’d parked the car and our front porch.
Likely I was more or less ambulatory—capable of toddling from the Oldsmobile to our doorway. But often the drive had been long and I was half asleep, or the night’s weather was bitterly cold. Dad would carry me to the steps—just to make it easier.
Multiple times every year, he’d stop on the walkway, midway to the steps, for a minute or two and pose this question: “Show me the North Star, Sonny.”
So, I would look up at the glittering heavens, puzzle a moment, locate the Big Dipper, then use the pattern’s two “bowl” stars to mark a straight line and trace my way over to the Little Dipper’s handle tip… Polaris, the Pole Star.
“There,” I’d say, gleefully doing my pointing-it-out part. And Dad would chuckle, pleased.
“Now,” he’d say, “you’ll always be able to find true north. When you know your directions, you’ll be able to find your way home after dark. You’ll never be lost.”
Dad would then go on to tell me how special that bright star was because of its singular unique characteristic.
“The North Star is like the hub at the center of a wheel,” he said. “A star that holds its place in the sky. Everything else shifts and spins around, changing position during the night and throughout the seasons—but the North Star stays put.”
The Big Dipper and Little Dipper aren’t considered true constellations. I’m not sure why since they’re also known as Ursa Major and Ursa Minor—the Great Bear and Little Bear—which are legitimate circumpolar constellations.
Like Ernest Hemingway, my father had a lifelong penchant for bears, along with pondering night skies.
Many nights, as my father and I stood in the cold darkness gazing upwards at the star-spangled sky, he would relate the Ojibway narrative from the pine-clad north country. The story of how, as the weather annually turned colder, this Great Sky Bear, amid his wanderings, came closer to the earth—so close he eventually washed his paws in the chilled waters of Gitche Gumee, or as we know it, Lake Superior.
“That old bear is coming down,” Dad would say—and we’d both stare, imagining.
After a proper silence, Dad would again make his point.
“Remember, Sonny, you can always count on that Polar Star being right smack where it should be. Find the North Star and you have your directional anchor.”
Then he’d give me a pat before we headed in.
“The old bear—the North Star—is dependable; a star of truth, a star you can always trust and believe. It’s the star you want to put your faith in,” he’d add, “the one that will always guide you safely on your journey—all the way home.”
Reach Jim McGuire at [email protected].
