Changes in the calendar have robbed December 13th of its former importance. In Christian tradition it remains the feast day of St Lucy, as it has been for many centuries. But since the calendar reforms of 1752, the date has been marooned from the significance it had when immortalised in the title of John Donne's poem: A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day, writes Frank McNally
Donne wallowed in the bleakness of what was still then (in the 1620s) the winter solstice. He had his reasons. He was up late on the eve of the 13th and oppressed by the surrounding darkness: "Tis the year's midnight and it is the day's/ Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks." But he was also remembering a woman he loved, now gone from him.
This is usually thought to be his wife, who died in 1617, aged 33, after giving birth to their 12th child (still-born). On the other hand, he also lost a beloved daughter - called Lucy - in 1627, when she was only 17. And later that same year, he was mourning the woman she was named after - his friend and patron the Countess of Bedford. Some people think she was the person mentioned in the verse.
In common with the rest of his poems, however, the Nocturnal was published only after he died, and its dating is a matter of conjecture. At any rate, Donne imagines himself in it as the personification of "absence, darkness, death" - the negation of all things - compared with which even mid-winter is light relief:
"The world's whole sap is sunk;/ The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,/ Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,/ Dead and interred; yet all these seem to laugh, /Compared with me, who am their epitaph."
Not that he was a man given to despair. An Anglican dean by the end of his life, he was confident of resurrection, and famously rose from his death-bed in 1631 to deliver a final sermon (on the theme of mortality, naturally).
He was also a great love poet. What is thought to be his earlier writing - when he was still a Catholic - includes the magnificently bawdy Elegy XIX. To his Mistress Going to Bed, in which he undresses the heroine in verse and then compares his exploration of her body to the discovery of America.
Even in the Nocturnal, as he mourns the loss of his personal "sun", he also notes that the star of that name is about to move into Capricorn - the constellation of the lecherous goat - and wishes well to those in a condition to move with it: "You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun/ At this time to the goat is run/ To fetch new lust and give it you/ Enjoy your summer all." Then he surrenders himself to the darkness again.
The original St Lucy would not have approved of Donne's bawdier poetry. A virgin martyr from Sicily, she is most famous for losing her eyes. In one version of the story, they were the features that an unwanted suitor most admired about her. So she plucked them out and gave them to him as a present, asking him to leave the rest of her alone.
In the less colourful version, it was the Roman emperor Diocletian who put them out. In any case, she is often depicted carrying her eyes on a plate and is the patron saint of those with optical problems. Italians mark her feast-day, charmingly, by eating "St Lucy's Eyes", small cakes or biscuits shaped like eyeballs.
In central Europe, the day was traditionally marked in a less gruesome manner, with fortune-tellers going from door to door reciting fertility chants. The chants particularly related to poultry. If the woman of the house did not welcome the visitors in the proper way, her chickens would die off until there was only one left, and that one - in another nod to the Lucy story - would go blind.
Throughout the continent, wherever it is celebrated, St Lucy's Day is most synonymous with light ceremonies. These are particularly popular in benighted Scandinavia, and typically involve a young female serving buns to her family or community while singing and wearing a wreath of lighted candles in her hair. Or at least that's what they involved before health-and-safety regulations caught up with them. Nowadays, fake battery-powered candles are more common. But the ceremonies remain popular in secular Sweden, with schools, villages, towns, and cities electing their own Lucias, and even a national Lucia competition, televised.
John Donne had an especially profound relationship with St Lucy's Day. On his last December 13th, in 1630, he took sick while visiting his daughter Constance, and promptly made his will. He lived until the following March. But he may have had a premonition on that earlier St Lucy's Day when he concluded his poem, as he had started: "Enjoy your summer all;/ Since she enjoys her long night's festival,/ Let me prepare towards her, and let me call/ This hour her vigil and her eve/ Since this both the year's and the day's deep midnight is."