Winter Solstice 2025

Every year my family honors the winter solstice. Often with friends, sometimes just the four of us. On the longest night of the year, we come together to celebrate the increasing sunlight. A new year. Rebirth. We bring drums. Our intention is to make joyful noise into the next day. (And sometimes we all actually follow a beat.) We make a fire. Occasionally we sing and dance. Together we mark the completion of a cycle and we join our spiritual community everywhere in the world—along with all the ancestors—birthing the infant sunlight.

Light from the darkness.

Wherever we are we can start over. The winter solstice is about completion. The following dawn brings new beginnings. It belongs to all of us. We all share the wonder and magic of the night sky full of starlight. We all share the hope in the first light of a new dawn.

On the winter solstice one cycle ends, a new one begins. The wheel of the year turns again. Rebirth for all of us, everywhere, all at once. The planet turns her face. New ideas are dreamt over the horizon. A new dawn awaits, just around this corner of the cosmos. When we stop and pay attention we can observe the start of a new cycle.

By the fall equinox the harvesting and planting on our farm began to slow down and with the decreasing light I embrace my yearly ritual: pulling in, regaining my strength and balance. Every evening there is more time to sleep, to take stock, to dream about the possibilities of what might come next. My ideas need to germinate. The day's work is finished by dark, by five o'clock. The long velvet night is mine to do with what I wish.

Just stop... I say to myself.

Going inward starts with stopping... to sit in the sun for a few minutes midday. I close my eyes and take in the warmth, even with the temperature heading toward zero. It is not easy to slow down. The gentle sunlight lures me onto a chair from which I catch the updraft with the local hawks and dance with the swooping starlings. I stay with them a while. If the day is damp and cloudy I sit within the moisture which will nourish the late winter seeds. If there is fog, I allow myself to be foggy, to be unsure, to not have to “know it all”. When it storms I sit under cover, perhaps on the porch or in the barn and enjoy the music of the rain, sometimes soothing, sometimes exciting.

Only after I slow down and observe do I understand that the Earth is strong. She will recover from our ignorance and hubris. It is our buildings which are crumbling and the systems which built them, the beliefs and laws and rules made for profit for the very few. We can resist; the earth is constantly showing us her resilience, her support, her marvels. The land continues to breath, to push up the cement sidewalks, the asphalt, the paved highways. Every wild plant coming up between the cracks in every supermarket parking lot is an affirmation of the vital living earth. All the resilience we need is under our feet.

A week before the solstice we begin to prepare.

I cut a small branch from one of my cypress trees to place around a circle of red candles. My choice of the red color is for birth and fertility. Bringing in evergreen boughs for the solstice dates back millennia. The circle is a symbol of renewal, rebirth, rejuvenation; a cycle with no beginning and no end. Conifer boughs—branches from evergreen trees—are a talisman, an ancient symbol of protection, trees with green leaves when all the others are bare. Long before there was a Christmas, evergreen branches were brought inside at midwinter and placed over the doors and windows, protection for the household during the coldest time of the year. The candles are fire and a symbol of warmth.

My focus for the spring and summer was to produce more. Pulling within during the dark months helps me to focus on how much I already have. All summer and well into fall my family makes jams, dries fruit and nuts, freezes vegetables, and presses oil from our olives; storing food for the winter from our bounty. At the solstice, we share our surplus. For our friends and neighbors we gather together jars of our jams and dried fruit. I decorate the jars with branches of rosemary I planted to hold the hillside from erosion. I add a few bright red seed pods from the dog rose bushes. The rosemary is another evergreen plant, accompanied by the fertile seeds of hope and rebirth. Sharing our food, celebrating our harvest (once again) is a yearly ritual. But the larger part of the celebration is the acknowledgement that we were just the midwives to the harvest. The hard work was done by the soil organisms, the saved seeds, the tree roots, the wind and the rain. Most important though, was the sunlight without which there would be no life. As we make our gifts, as we cut the evergreen boughs, as we drum, we celebrate the increasing sunlight.

The day after the solstice we gain a few more minutes of sunlight. Every new year, every season, every cycle, every brand new twenty four hours is a new beginning.

Seize the day.

In a previous lifetime, Zia Gallina worked as a botanist for the National Parks Service and was professor of biology and environmental science at American University, Washington D.C. But she has always been a champion of small-scale biointensive farming, tagging behind Mother Nature, trying to stay as close as she can get.

The offspring is an artist, photographer, writer and farmer.

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