The longest night is here (in the northern hemisphere)! May your celebrations be warm and joyous, filled with love and comfort. Good wishes to you from me this holiday season!

The Shortest Day has arrived (in the Northern Hemisphere–Longest in the Southern)! It’s a day viewed with awe and relief by ancestors throughout the world, marking the beginning of the Sacred Sun’s long arc of return to strength. I just want to wish you warm, meaningful and joyous celebrations of this time of year, however you may observe them, and thanks for being a part of the Atheopagan community. Wolcum Yule!

Why not consider some of the great suggestions Jon Cleland Host has over at Naturalistic Paganism? Remember, too, that we are coming to the end of 2021, when our Atheopagan Chosen Charity has been BLACK LIVES MATTER. All proceeds from the Atheopagan Zazzle store will go to BLM through December 31. So head over there and see if there is something you’d like to gift, or for yourself! Like, say, our famous Axial Tilt Winter Solstice Cards…which are currently 50% off!

Yule is of course a joyous time for celebrating love and family and the return of the Sacred Sun. But it also marks the end of the cycle of the year and the beginning of a new, and it is this I’d like to address today. I often talk about the “arc” of the year instead of the Wheel of the Year, because in my conceptualization of how a human life maps metaphorically onto the year’s cycle, there is an important segment–the period between Hallows and Yule–which we never experience at all, because they are the time of Decomposition and Recomposition. They are what happens after we die, and before…

A very joyous Longest Night (or Longest Day, in the Southern Hemisphere) to you! Here is a compendium of Yuletide traditions, projects and rituals you can use to inspire your own celebrations. Wolcum Yule!

Over the years, I’ve posted quite a bit about my Atheopagan Yule traditions. I thought I’d pull links to them together here for easy reference. Yule, overlapping so heavily with the Christian/secular holiday of Christmas, is a time when many of our Pagan traditions are widespread, and with many old threads of lore and practice layered over one another. Whether your household goes all out, with a tree and gifts and parties and the Holly King in his guise as Saint Nicholas, or simply lights candles to call back the light into the world, it is a time of both hope and fear, a time for reflection on what has…

My final wish for you all this Yule season is that you be surrounded with love. We are social apes, we humans, and loneliness is a terrible burden to us. Here at the dark and cold time of year, we can feel even more isolated, even more as though we must face life’s trials on our own. It is quite likely that this was one of the main drivers of the creation of our Winter Solstice traditions in the first place. I happen to be someone who has no blood family any longer. It’s better that way, overall: the dynamic within my family was toxic and abusive and would not, could…

My second hope for you at Yule is that you engage the season with bravery. This is the time when we stand up to darkness and cold and the prospect of much more of it, and we do so with a combination of brazen silliness and real strength: the kind of strength it takes to deal with difficult family members and multiple obligations and inclement weather and looming deadlines and planned projects and lists and unsnarling the bloody lights and figuring out where we put the tree stand last year and deciphering Grandma’s 40-year-old spider-scrawl on that recipe that simply MUST be made. The many demands of life multiply at…