How to Celebrate the Winter Solstice When You Are Out of Time

Five things you can do to celebrate the longest night with no preparation

A good man in my town whom with I am acquainted but do not really know approached me. He explained that the winter solstice had recently become a significant and profoundly important day for him, his wife, and their children. He had read The Shaforay and said he would like to pick my brain on how to celebrate every year. We are now—as we are so often in life—running out of time; the longest night is nearly upon us! So then, what can we do to celebrate the days growing longer when we have nearly no time to prepare?

Build a Fire

People since time immemorial have, in the words of Susan Cooper, “burned beseeching fires all night long / To keep the year alive” during the solstice. This seems to be a shared, instinctive tradition throughout all of northern Europe and beyond. Whatever the case may be—and even if that is not your own ancestry—building a fire on the solstice, however large or small, does feel like it drives the dark away. Moreover, building a fire is slow, it does not offer instant gratification, it is messy, and it may well be illegal where you live. I would posit that these are all exceptionally good reasons to have one. So much of our modern world has become so safe and prescribed. It has become so clean and easy. Even if you live in a megacity, perhaps there is a quiet corner of your concrete world you can light and sit with a little candle. On the longest night, in the dead of winter’s tyranny, what is more appropriate than to build a defiant fire to not only cast out the dark, but all our strange backward modern notions as well?

Illustration © 2019 by Carson Ellis/Candlewick Press

Have an Impromptu Feast

Winter has always been a time to gather around a table heavily laden with food, a sort of ironic testament to our abundance in a time normally associated with so much scarcity, want, and rationing. A feast does not require grandeur; it needs only your intention. Bring together what you have—roast vegetables from the root cellar, bread still warm from the oven, or even a simple charcuterie board—and share it freely. The act of eating together, of passing shared dishes and exchanging stories, is as old as humanity itself. In doing this act, this communal testament to abundance in scarce times, we celebrate not just the solstice but our connections to one another, our community, and the continuous thread we share with all those who came before us. Remember, a feast is not measured by its extravagance but by the spirit in which it is given, received, and shared. If anything, a feast that is unusual in theme or execution may be more appropriate than something expected here in this most unbalanced time of year! A feast of only cheese, a tasting flight of various local ciders, a sampling of everything you canned from your garden: all these and more can be a fun and appropriate alternative to what we normally think of as a feast this time of year.

It ultimately doesn’t matter what you serve; just that you took the time to care enough to do it.