12/21/2025
🌑 Winter Solstice Ritual: Preparing Your Altar
Welcoming the return of light
The Winter Solstice has long been honored not as a single night, but as the opening of a slow turning — a time to release, reflect, and re-orient as the light begins to return.
This altar does not need to be elaborate.
It needs to be intentional.
💫Tonight — the Solstice
1) Clear a small surface — a table, shelf, or windowsill — and let this act represent laying down what no longer needs to be carried.
(Traditionally, homes were cleaned before the Solstice to prepare for renewal.)
2) Gather a few simple symbols:
a candle for returning light,
something from nature,
and one object that feels grounding, ancestral, or personal.
3) Light the candle and pause.
This flame does not erase the darkness —
it honors the promise that light returns in its own time.
4) Ask gently:
What has this past year asked me to endure?
What am I ready to release?
That is enough for tonight.
Rest.
🕯️In the days that follow:
Across many ancestral traditions, the Solstice opened a 13-day window — a time of slow orientation, not resolution.
Each day, you might return briefly to your altar:
to light the candle,
to sit in stillness,
to name one word or direction that feels true.
No pressure to know everything.
Let these days be a compass, not a checklist.
Close whenever it feels right with one gentle intention —
not a goal, but a direction.
I honor what has been.
I welcome what is returning.
I trust the slow light.
