While many people in the Christian faith are celebrating the birth of the “savior” Jesus Christ and people in the Jewish faith are celebrating the Festival of Lights, some of us are celebrating the Winter Solstice.

Indeed, the Winter Solstice is thought to be the true Christmas story, with the Christian version added later to personify it.

What follows is an excerpt from an article called Winter Solstice — Gift of Illumination, by Dorothea Hamann. Click on the link if you want to read the whole thing.

From Winter Solstice — Gift of Illumination, by Dorothea Hamann

Christmas is here again, and there is good reason for joy because the sun, now far away in the south, begins to travel north at the winter solstice, bringing the wintry earth a new promise of light and warmth.

On the night of December 21/22, the sun reaches its southernmost point. Were it to remain in the south, it would mean death for living beings in the northern hemisphere. Thus we greet the returning sun as a “savior.” On the night when it begins its northward journey, the constellation Virgo, the celestial virgin, appears on the eastern horizon at midnight and is therefore, astrologically, the ascendant. This coordinates with the myth of the various saviors of humanity, immaculately conceived and born from a virgin. Later, the sun symbolically sacrifices its life on the cross when it passes over the equinoctial point at the spring equinox, an apparent descent as seen from the southern hemisphere and an ascent in the northern sky. The focal points of the year — the four sacred seasons of the solstices and equinoxes — affect the consciousness of all humanity; and no matter on which day the festivals fall, they can provide gateways for the properly attuned heart and mind, allowing us to enter the forecourt of the temple of learning and life.

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Here is a link to another article that might interest you: Christmas and the Winter Solstice

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And for a list of articles dealing with Sacred Seasons, click here.

Happy Solstice!

— Jillian