After the First Dark, Hours of Winters Past

The winter is here my friends, a bit late perhaps, and it filled the courtyards and roofs of our homes with snow . . . turning all of our villages into a winter wonderland.

Putting aside all the difficulties with intermittent electric, lack of heating fuel and a snail’s pace service from the snow plows, we managed relatively well.
Many people were snowed in in  their villages and many were left without electricity for hours on end. And that’s what incited me to bring you to times past with these writings . . . to the villages of Crete, back when things were simpler, more frugal, back when technology still had not left its imprint on our civilization.

When the white frost of winter covered our villages and people had more hours in their homes without any television and, after dusk, folks would gather in one or two homes and do the aposperitha.
The word itself is a composite word of a Cretan idiom and means after the evening. It might also mean the time that the aposperitis evening star reaches its zenith. Here we gather that, aposperitha is the time when the real darkness falls. And that’s the time when most villagers would stop their chores and gather with friends and relatives.

This, after-dusk-get-together-time, besides being a means for human communication and interaction, it was also a ritual. The “regular program” included the telling of fairytales by the elders. They sat around the fire place, the brazier or the wood burning stove and, under the faint light the fairytale characters, would come to life through grandpa’s and grandma’s words.
This process also had an educational character, because it brought forth values, morals, ideals, faith and gestures and nods more understood by kids, but also from adults.
  

Coming back to today though, after our brief foray into the past, I sadly see that too many things have become too easy.
Technology and globalization make for an easier and fast life. We have almost totally lost the simplicity and purity with which people of times past would communicate and interact.

It is a deficiency which is hard to replenish.