It's Christmas in a few days. It's Hanukkah this week. It's Kwanzaa time. Soon it will be New Year's Day.

Underlying all these holidays, it is the winter solstice, when the sun "stands still" in its apparent daily journey south along the horizon and begins to move back north a little bit every day, bringing longer daylight hours, warmth and spring.

That's what started all these holidays. Way back in prehistoric times, people were watching the sky. It mattered.

I used to invite my history of science students to imagine that they were abducted by aliens and deposited on a new planet where they would have to survive by their wits and by observing their new environment. All their attention would be on: What could they eat safely? Were there any predators? What was the weather going to be? What was the climate going to be? What should they do now to survive tomorrow?

That's what our prehistoric ancestors had to do. Think about the huge amount of information that early human cultures (the ones that survived) amassed about what is good to eat, what the environment is, what to wear, how to hunt, gather and grow food. It was a good thing, too, because otherwise human beings wouldn't be here today.

Students of prehistory tell us that people were watching the sky, tracking the behavior of the sun, moon, planets and stars, from earliest times. As they understood these movements, and correlated them with the seasons, they were also passing down this knowledge.

In the days before writing, and before the existence of separate languages of science or mathematics -- that is, for most of human history -- people passed down knowledge by memory, through stories, songs, dances and art, and by monuments, of which the best-known is Stonehenge, but examples of which exist all over the world.

And it was probably inevitable that the knowledge of astronomy, natural history and other bedrock survival knowledges became intertwined with religion, law, art, myth and literature, as the stories and dances that once may have had a utilitarian purpose migrated and shaded into other areas of human thought and activity. In fact, today the Greek myths, the Scandinavian myths, the Native American myths and other myths from human cultures can be seen to contain traces of this prehistorically gathered astronomical lore.

For example, Mercury, Mars, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, the sun and the moon and all Greek and Roman deities are also the names of the heavenly bodies we can see with the naked eye and that dance against the background of the stars. The stories we still rehearse of their battles, their love affairs, their adventures and their travels may be the metaphorical traces of a language that once upon a time was a way to report on and transmit essential knowledge of the world.

In the days before writing, or a special language of mathematics or astronomy, stories and songs were standard operating procedure. I'm thinking of the peoples of Oceania, who into historical times memorized and passed on long, long songs that enabled them to sail across vast distances of the Pacific to specific islands and atolls, using directions based on the times when various stars and constellations would be rising out of the ocean.

A more familiar example might be the African-American slaves, who, traveling to the north and freedom, sang "Follow the drinking gourd," keeping surely in the right direction as pointed out by the Big Dipper and the North Star, as they traveled unfamiliar and dangerous territory.

The story of the wise men following a star to Bethlehem may reflect a common way of navigating across the desert, where the landmarks may shift after every sandstorm and the stars in the sky are much more trustworthy guides. Isn't it good to think that this familiar religious story connects us to a vastly older human endeavor of survival through collecting and transmitting knowledge about the world?

Theodora J. Kalikow is president of the University of Maine at Farmington. She can be reached at kalikow@maine.edu