Let us not forget our mortality

A recent brief but memorable conversation with my neighbor the other day left me pondering the winter season and our modern cultural relationships with the seasons of the year. This friend, RM, and I were discussing the winter holidays and noting the highly intensified stress levels we modern westerners seem to experience this time of year. Family dynamics often explode with lifetimes of festering subsurface funk, dormant human-feeding viruses wake up and feast upon the tired and cold among us, we break our banks buying stupid crap to give each other, and the widespread cultural expectation to be cheerful peers around from every corner, mercilessly laughing in our faces.
I expressed that it is absurd for our major holiday season to be held in the darkest, most difficult time of the year. RM explained that the original reason for these winter holidays was for that precise reason. She said that the dark season awakens very old fears in us, and that the holidays were intended to band people together to provide extra support for each other during the coldest, roughest time of the year.
Very old fears. A chill runs down my back, and the fears, buried shallowly beneath my modern illusions of invincibility stir and grumble. Fears of cold, of sickness, of starvation, of perish, of the icy fingers of death itself. These are indeed age-old fears; they are the same fears that drove each generation of ancestors to survive year after year, through whatever trials each season unveiled. They are old fears, but they are not irrelevant fears.
The lines between health and sickness, thriving and perishing, life and death are thinner than I like to be aware of. We are organisms among many on this earth, and despite our desperate desire to believe there is someone out there (who favors our type of organism) controlling it all, the bottom line is we are just as subject to the laws of nature as our cavemen ancestors, as the birds and the four-leggeds, and as the viruses that we try to kill with antibiotics. We are eating and being eaten, and we will ultimately perish at the benefit of someone or something else.
Let us not forget our mortality.
RM and I wondered whether we modern westerners have the skills to make the holidays what they were intended to be- to improve our collective strength by banding together in the toughest time of the year. I think we do. And if we don't, we ought to make it our business to remember what is surely as basic and ancient in our human psyches as the fear of winter. Let us remember how to find collective strength in the darkness.