Reflections on the Winter Solstice

In the Northern Hemisphere this year, December 21, the day I’m posting this entry, is the winter solstice. As Catherine Boekmann of the The Old Farmer’s Almanac explained, “the winter solstice is the day with the fewest hours of sunlight…making it the ‘shortest day’ of the year.” Put another way, the winter solstice has the longest number of hours of darkness in any day throughout the course of the year.

As Boekmann noted, many cultures have placed significance on the winter solstice: “Some ancient peoples even marked the solstice using huge stone structures….” Two such places she pointed out are Newgrange in Ireland and Stonehenge in England. Other cultures have celebrated the winter solstice with feasts and festivals, and Boekmann listed as examples the feast of Saturnalia as celebrated in ancient Rome and the festival of Juul as celebrated in ancient Scandinavia.

Winter solstice Stonehenge 2004 (Wikimedia/Vicky WJ)

As the editors at History.com have explained, many of the traditional Saturnalia customs show up in modern Western celebrations of Christmas, “including giving gifts, singing, lighting candles, feasting and merrymaking….” Modern echoes of the festival of Juul (also spelled Jól or Yule) can also be found. The History.com editors have noted that “Yule celebrations involved great amounts of feasting and drinking” and “similar to making a New Year’s resolution, the swearing of oaths was a tradition at Yule celebrations.”

For me this year, the darkness of the winter solstice seems a more apt description of my mood than the joyful aspects of these ancient celebrations. Since about October, I’ve had a song running through my head that features the line “in the bleak mid-winter.” Even though October is clearly not midwinter, my sentiments have felt midwinter-like since then, dark and bleak and dreary.

The lyrics of the song are from Christina Rossetti’s poem “A Christmas Carol.” It’s only the opening stanza of this poem that has been running through my head:

In the bleak mid-winter

Frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron,

Water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

Snow on snow,

In the bleak mid-winter,

Long ago.

The words “bleak,” “frosty,” “hard as iron,” and “like a stone” seem to capture my emotions best. And the long “o” sounds throughout the stanza evoke the sounds one might make when mourning.

The tune that accompanies the lyrics is fairly dirge-like to me. It’s certainly not an uplifting, lilting tune in any case. In church when I was a kid, each Christmastime we sang the hymn called “In the Bleak Midwinter” that used Rosetti’s lyrics, and when I now imagine it being sung, the doleful, repeated “snow on snow” line strikes a chord. You can listen to a portion of the instrumental version of it on the Hymnary.org website and sing along.

All this might lead some to ask why I am feeling so bleak. The reasons are many. I’ve mentioned several in my blog posts over the past year. In January, a friend’s situation prompted me to write about relationship abuse. In April, May, and June, I wrote about emergencies, coping, and coping with emergencies, all of which were prompted by current events, such as natural disasters, wars, data breaches, political polarization, the de-funding of public media, and health emergencies like measles outbreaks, bird flu, and collective trauma from the COVID-19 pandemic.

To continue the list, July brought a post prompted by threats to the existence of the Fulbright Program. And my September and October posts focused on health writing, where I mentioned many instances of medical disinformation currently proliferating. If that’s not enough to make anyone feel bleak, I don’t know what is. But that list only covers widespread stressful events, not to mention stressors of a more personal nature.

So, this winter solstice, others might be celebrating that from this point forward those of us in the Northern Hemisphere will be enjoying more hours of sunshine each day. But I’m feeling bleak and have been for several months. And I know I’m not the only one feeling this way.

In the Power Lines podcast I listen to weekly, one of the hosts, Jon Passantino, said on December 5, 2025, “I think we’re living in Hell…” (at 0:01). His comment was in reference to investigations into recent possible war crimes and/or murder committed by the US Department of Defense. In the same episode, his co-host, Oliver Darcy, called the current moment “disturbing and…highly alarming” (24:58–25:03). His comment was in reference to current US government infringement on the freedom of the press.

I hope that despite these dire circumstances, you’re not feeling as bleak as I am. If you are, know you’re not alone. And as a way to counteract so much bleakness, let’s all try to find ways to spread some love around. Certainly we could use it.

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