January was a long month, but now the roots of the huge willow tree in the garden embrace clumps of snowdrops, and mornings and evenings begin to lighten. Candlemas is always a kind of fulcrum of the year, midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.
It is not, to my knowledge, part of the devotion of the feast to believe that if your candle drips wax down one side only this portends the death of a family member that year.
Perhaps they do in other countries, which is a lovely idea, but risky given how much more flammable candles are than snowdrops.
I find it fascinating that one of the earliest diktats of the English Reformation was that no candles might be burnt in church except those on the altar, and yet superstitions around Candlemas have survived years in English folklore. It shows how powerful an anthropological hold Catholic rituals retained. They derive from an immature understanding of religious cults or their corruption.
Superstition is to faith what fetish is to sexuality: an attempt to reduce the whole mystery to a detail of it because one is frightened of the mystery and needs to feel in control of it. Superstition is the defence mechanism of one whose heart tells him that the world of the divine is everywhere and immensely more powerful and mysterious than can be grasped by his understanding.
