How Do You Celebrate Winter Solstice (esp if u h8 wintr)?
A little goodie bag of ideas
Dear Beautiful Friends,
Coming in under the wire as we slide into the shortest day of the year (in the N. hemisphere). Hello, Winter Solstice! Hello, 4 pm darkness my old friend. And, hellooo lengthening days!
Confession: I love the short dark cuddly cozy days this time of year. I love winter’s offering of a kind of existential privacy of the soul, a time to reflect, slow down, and contemplate, as well as a season throbbing with anticipation of longer, lighter days to come. I love it all, especially drinking vats of hot cocoa on the couch.
PS. And I am a big-time summer person.
But what if you’re someone who greets the dark season with existential terror?
What if you want to throw rotten tomatoes at everyone “celebrating” winter??
And how ‘bout if you’re curious to know more about how one “celebrates” this solstice?
A few ideas, followed by a sweet treat of three bold, beautiful essays from gorgeous thinkers with their ideas.
In line with Beauty Hunter's philosophy, you don’t have to celebrate anything you don’t want. Just say no to forced happiness and celebrations. Instead, you could acknowledge the day or onset of winter in a way that makes sense to you. For example, you can give the natural world a high-five (or a toast; blow it a kiss) simply because it does love our company and our engagement, and unconditionally loves us back no matter what our mood or existential dread might be.
Once I joined my friend Ann Teplick and friends to write some poems together. I think we wrote a sestina, which I was scared to do because it felt like a complicated impossible format. Well, together we wrote a seven-stanza poem comprised of six end-words that changed position and went on to write a butt-load of sestinas, for years.
Winter officially starts on Thursday, December 21, 2023, at 7:27 PM PST | 10:27 P.M. EST. You could set an alarm a few minutes before the official change-over and simply be there to “watch” the season change. As in: put your head up, look outside a window for five, three, one, half a minute, and when the clock ticks over to 7:27 or 10:27 and it’s officially winter, that’s it. You acknowledged the solstice, and that could be your “celebration.”
I don’t know what I’m going to do but I do love an evening walk around my neighborhood, so I might take a spin and call it a season.
Watch the Solstice Sunrise live from Stonehenge 🤯🌟🧚♀️
Here are some essays on winter, the solstice, and living that I’m gaga for.
All three of these women/writers/authors/existential explorers have wonderful ways of embracing life and living. Treat yourself!
1. Katherine May wrote a book called Wintering: The Power of Rest & Retreat in Difficult Times that completely opened my mind to being with the darker times—literally & figuratively. Her Substack, The Clearing is more beautiful writing and thinking. Here’s a piece to get you re-visioning this time of year.
If you’re looking for a gift for that sensitive, thoughtful soul in your life, right here:
Sonya Lea, also writing on Substack at Wanderland, is a friend, author, teacher; a wanderer and explorer of inner and outer worlds. Her “Practices for the Darkest Night,” below is about bringing more wintering practices into daily life, steering clear of productivity, and so much more. Sonya is also an activist who continues to invite me to think and act more deeply and purposefully. After you read this essay, you will want to read her magnificent memoir, Wondering Who You Are, a story about re-inventing her marriage following her husband’s brain injury that resulted in massive memory loss.
Stocking stuffer extraordinaire!
Heather Havrilesky writes on Substack as advise columnist, Ask Polly. She also wrote one of my favorite memoirs about being married: Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage. I am TOTALLY gaga over this book, how bold and honest and brutal and beautiful, messy and mean, surprising and kind it is. Havrilesky can hold and swirl together so many tonal human flavors and observations into a scene it blows my mind. She so radically goes ALL IN, showing us what it is to be human.
The following piece was previously published at Sari Botton’s Oldster Substack, as an Oldster Questionaire. This isn’t about seasonal wintering per se, but maybe a different kind of wintering as seen in aging. Here’s the deal: It’s too good NOT to read. Here’s a wee snippet that delighted me:
”Even when women say “I feel invisible now,” I want to tell them, “If that bothers you, maybe try wearing something bright orange?” . . . Women improve by the hour. A big part of getting older, for me, is noticing that and celebrating it. “
Give the gift of the roller coaster ride of marriage, aka, the joy ride of life to someone you love:
If you want to join me and other Beauty Hunters in a year-end assessment, aka the Audit, here’s a starter kit and outline on how to do one (aka how *I* do mine). We already had the salon around this, but give it a go if you’d like, and let us know how it goes. Leave a comment, email me, tell a friend, go nuts. XO
