Happy Holidays!

[Kathryn]

I celebrate the solstices because I believe that God made them and they're a cool thing. I like the symbolism as well.

Just because something isn't cloaked in a religious dogma doesn't make it "pagan" in the negative sense of the word.

I never have understood why some religious people are so paranoid about celebrating the cycles of nature and the very cool, pretty much universal, human celebrations that revolve around the natural world.

[cloudedice]

As I mentioned in another thread, my plan for next year is to do something similar. I'm a Neopagan while my wife is a non-practicing Christian. We plan on letting our kids choose their own religion.

I've always celebrated Christmas since that's what my family and my wife's family does. I intend to keep that tradition, but next year I'm going to add a Winter Solstice celebration. The plan is to have a nice family meal then to tell the stories of different religious/cultural holidays nearby. (Chanukah, Jesus' birth, Holly and Oak Kings, Santa Claus, etc.)

While my son will be too young to understand what's going on (he should be born any day now...), I hope it will become a tradition for us to celebrate all the love and cheer of this season.

[EverChanging]

Storm, your celebration sounds very beautiful and similar in some ways to how I observed the holidays this year. Thank you for sharing.

For a long time, I've celebrated different traditions and ways of worshiping, praying, and meditating, and I think for the first time, my own worship is taking a more concrete, stable form, and I never thought it would look like it does now, but I'm learning on my own path that we must simply accept what is, and my worship is what it is. I have a tendency to merge conflicting worldviews, and I fought it for a long time, I think simply because other people that I identify with in many ways -- neopagans, atheists, humanists, pantheists and even Christians -- would not understand it, and I guess that leaves me feeling like I don't belong to any group, eclectic as I am. But I'm okay with that. My own religious labels on these forums are just that, labels, and labels will never encompass an entire worldview and way of being.

I make resolutions every Solstice and Equinox. During the school year, I worship on these days with my neo-pagan friends, but this Solstice I was on my own, so I observed Yule with meditation and prayer at my own altar and honored the coming of the light, the rebirth of the god, symbolic of the rebirth of the solar year and increasing light. I was up all night, and I simply enjoyed the time to myself. After my rituals, I worked on my resolutions and reviewed the time since the last quarter point of the year in my journal: I've kept one for years. It has become a very comforting tradition for me to review my life and goals at each Solstice and Equinox, and I look forward to it.

As far as I'm concerned, Yule, Christmas, Christmas Eve, Advent, the Solstice -- all of these are beautiful to me and a part of traditions that go back thousands of years all over the world -- they are universal, a part of one another...the strict lines we draw between them are just that, lines -- not real divisions. So on Christmas Eve I continued my celebration of this entire season with my friend Becky while she was in the area. We exchanged gifts and went to a midnight mass together -- Christ is the same to me as the god or the solar year in some ways -- and I celebrated Christmas with my family in the usual way, along with my own reflection and meditations. It has all been very peaceful and nice to me. To me, Christmas is not "just" a Christian holiday -- it is a constellation of cultural traditions that have developed all over the world for centuries before Christianity, so there is no conflict to me in celebrating Yule, a midnight mass (communion is also not just strictly Christian, though I *usually* honor it in the Christian way, at least when I don't take it alone), and Christmas -- all of these are a part of the same season to me. I don't strictly syncretise them, either. I don't feel a need to, in light of their similarities. They are all my way of celebrating universal natural events. And to be honest (and I guess this comes from the neopagan elements of my practices), I don't need a big reason to celebrate. It's just fun and meaningful to me.