A non-religious holiday ritual – the Atlantic Ocean

Low winter sun casts oblique light, a specific shade that is at once happy and sad – very appropriate for this time of year. Almost every city dweller I know clings to the fleeting moments of joyous glow during the last dark days of the calendar.

This year, the winter solstice arrives at 4:20 ET Saturday, December 21st. Due to the tilt of the Earth’s axis, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere will find ourselves tilted away from the Sun. A day later we start going back towards it. While summer solstice is built for partying – short sleeves, sizzling barbecues, think of an icy cooler – the winter solstice is a quieter, more reflective time. Maybe you have no plans to mark the solstice beyond staying in and letting the short day slip by (understandably). But for anyone inclined to venture outside, the solstice is a pristine time for the simple act notes.

In 1894, the poet Edith M. Thomas published an essay in Atlantic Ocean with the title “From Winter Solstice to Spring Equinox.” The opening sentence is particularly evocative. “My first glimpse of the morning was through a loophole in the frosted window,” writes Thomas. “I saw the morning star and a candle at a neighbor’s, both of which cast a thousand flashes on the frosted glass. I was reminded of salt-water flakes and spars in a white cave suddenly illuminated by a torch.” Thomas keeps her senses turned into the present and heightens her powers of observation: “Looking out to the distant woods, my attention was drawn to mysterious play of two wind-blown plumes of smoke proceeding from the chimneys of the farmhouse.”

Celebrating the solstice is an ideal ritual for those of us who feel drawn to maintaining seasonal traditions, even if we are ambivalent about organized religion. In December 1930, an unnamed Atlantic Ocean contributor wrote: “Our Christmas puddings and cake, like our showy tree, our holly wreaths and mistletoe, are part of the symbolism that unites us not only with our living companions, but with all those people who have celebrated the winter solstice with festivity and joy. ” The author affectionately refers to himself as a “heathen” since they attend mass only once a year – a midnight service on Christmas Eve – and do not subscribe to any established religion. Of course, even without any religious institution, nodding to the solstice can be a way to tap into your spiritual side.

Almost 100 years later, in a Atlantic Ocean episode called The Conversation, two readers, Ruth Langstraat and Roxanne WhiteLight, shared their tradition of exchanging writing as a gift: “Several years ago, my wife and I felt we needed a better way to celebrate or mark the winter season of change .We had grown so tired of the materialistic push that feels like such a part of the time.We now celebrate the 12 days from the solstice to the new year us for a theme and 12 elements of that theme … Then we each write a poem in the simplest form of a cinquain, a five-line stanza. And we read the poems to each other.”

Winter is the perfect time to find a comforting lamp and put pen to paper, but there’s no obligation that what you write has to be joyful. Poet Louise Glück captured the stark northeastern essence of this time of year with just a few simple phrases—”pointy sun,” “bone pale”—in her 1967 poem “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson,” published in Atlantic Ocean. In the poem, Glück describes the sight of a recent snow attached “like fur to the river.” Tragically, as my colleague Zoë Schlanger recently reported, snow this time of year is now an anomaly for millions of Americans: Our winters are getting warmer and wetter.

But they are still dark as ever. Perhaps with so much dreary winter(ish) reality to contend with, it’s time to seriously consider my colleague Charlie Warzel’s argument that we should leave our Christmas trees up until March. In 2022, Charlie wrote of the emptiness of January symbolized by his recently kicked-to-the-kerb tree: “When I stare at this hole, I begin to feel as if a light has gone out into the world.” He continued: “There’s no need to embrace the New Year in darkness. It’s time we instituted a new practice of keeping our trees and our lights up as we ride out the winter months. Normalize prolonged celebration!”

Fighting the darkness with light is really what choosing to recognize Solstice is all about. In addition to all the usual Christmas carols, I make a point of listening to “Snow is falling in Manhattan,” by Purple Mountains, from the final project by David Berman. As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote in one of two tributes to the songwriter after he died in 2019, “Berman outlined a winter evening in New York City as a beautiful apocalypse.” Such stark juxtaposition – beginning and end, up and down, happy and sad, light and dark – is part of the spirit of December 21. As Berman sings:

This article originally stated that the solstice is related to the Earth’s distance from the sun; in fact, it is caused by the tilt of the planet’s axis.