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!