Yes, we Unitarian Universalists do celebrate the Winter Solstice as a religious holiday.  It's just a few days before Christmas, so everything seems to run together, but the solstice, the day with the longest night of the year, has meaning for us.  There are two strands of meaning, coming from very different perspectives.  First, we are a people who honor reason and the results of science in our religious life, and one of the really important scientific truths is the miracle -- we can call it that -- of the earth's wobbly way of moving around the sun, tipping outward and then inward, creating times of more and less light in different parts of the planet.  It's something to celebrate, for sure, when Earth reaches the farthest extent of its wobbling and starts to head the other way.  The coldest days of winter may still lie ahead, but there will be more light each day after the Winter Solstice.  Second, we honor ancient traditions that existed before Christianity and alongside it in the Northern Hemisphere. In those traditions, the return of the sun was an exciting event full of mythical meaning, accompanied by ceremony and symbolism.  Some of us like to re-create the ancient myths and symbols, honoring the wisdom, as best we can rediscover and reconstruct it, of people who lived long ago, whose traditions were displaced. 

By honoring the Winter Solstice and its traditions separately, we clear the way to honor Christmas as a Christian holiday.  Solstice is about evergreen trees with shiny, sun-like ornaments in their branches, about dreaming in the dark of the return of the light, about the blessing of the cycles of growth and decay in our fields, in nature, and in our lives.  Christmas is about the birth of a baby, the love of parents for their child, the everyone feels as a baby comes into our human family, the Love that surrounds us all, even as we live in a world of struggle and suffering, the Love that comes to life among people with this special birth.  And it's true:  neither one of these special religious days requires trips to the mall. They are both good days to think of helping others, remembering that we are all one.

At the Unitarian Universalist Church of Manchester, we celebrate the Winter Solstice at 7:00 PM on Thursday, December 20.  We celebrate Christmas Eve with two services, one primarily for families at 6:00 PM and a candlelight service at 8:00 PM.      

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