Celebrating the Winter Solstice

And a foraged festive mantlepiece

“This is the solstice, the still point

Of the sun, its cusp and midnight,

The year’s threshold

And unlocking, where the past

Lets go of and becomes the future;

The place of caught breath, the door

Of a vanished house left ajar.”

Margaret Atwood.

Today is the Winter Solstice, or Yule as the Celts called it: the shortest day or longest night depending on how you look at it. It is the year’s midnight as Margaret Atwood describes, the turning point of it all. Yule is a time to turn inward, to slow, to rest and revive. For me it coincides with the end of term and I have never needed those things more.