Today is the feast day of Santa Lucia, a woman in 4th century Rome during a time of horrible persecution of Christians and much of the rest of the population, and she was martyred. The reasons for her martyrdom vary: Did she really gouge out her eyes because a suitor commented on their beauty? Did she die because she had promised her virginity to Christ? Was she killed because the evil emperor had ordered her to be taken to a brothel because she was giving away the family wealth? Was she killed because a rejected suitor outed her for being a Christian? We don’t really know.

She is most often pictured with a crown of candles on her head, and tradition says that she wore a candle crown into the catacombs when she took provisions to the Christians hiding there. With a candle crown, she freed up a hand to carry more supplies. I love this idea, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that it isn’t true.

Truth often doesn’t matter with these popular saints like Lucia, Nicholas, and Valentine. We love the traditions, and that means we often know more about the traditions than we do about the saints behind them, if we know anything at all about the saints behind these popular days.

This feast day still seems relevant for two reasons. First, Lucia shows us the struggle that women face in daily existence in a patriarchal culture, the culture that most of us still must endure. It’s worth remembering that many women in many countries today don’t have any more control over their bodies or their destinies than these long-ago virgin saints did. In this time of Advent waiting, we can remember that God chose to come to a virgin mother who lived in a culture that wasn’t much different than Santa Lucia’s culture: highly stratified, with power concentrated at the top, power in the hands of white men, which made life exceeding different for everyone who wasn’t a powerful, wealthy, white man. It’s a society that sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

On this feast day of Santa Lucia, we can spend some time thinking about women, about repression, about what it means to control our destiny. We can think about how to spread freedom.

It’s also an important feast day because of the time of year when we celebrate. Even though we’re still in the season of late autumn, in terms of how much sunlight we get, those of us in the northern hemisphere are in the darkest time of the year. It’s great to have a festival that celebrates the comforts of this time of year: candles and baked goods and hot beverages.

I love our various festivals to get us through the dark of winter. In these colder, darker days, I wish that the early church fathers had put Christmas further into winter, so that we can have more weeks of twinkly lights and candles to enjoy. Christmas in February makes more sense to me, even though I understand how Christmas ended up near the Winter Solstice.

I made my traditional Santa Lucia bread last week, for a gathering where I wanted one slightly healthier treat to be available. Today, I’m baking a different bread, but you could make a more traditional offering. If you’d like to try,this blog post will guide you through it. You could end with bread braids cooling on racks in just a few hours:

If you’re the type who needs pictures, it’s got a link to a blog post with pictures. Enjoy.

Happy Santa Lucia day! Have some special bread, drink a bracing hot beverage, and light the candles against the darkness.