We had a wonderful night last night. The boys chose our "feast", which was pizza (round, to symbolize the sun, and just plain yummy too). After eating, we went out wassailing in our backyard - anything to appease our apple and pear trees, doncha know. ;-) 
Then we had a fire outside. Oooh we love us a good fire! We wrote down on paper some things that we wanted to let go of in our lives, and then we burned them. Oh, we burned them alright!!
See that paper about to burn right there? I had to snap a pic of that one, that one my husband threw in and it says "working too much." We all really liked watching that one burn.Right...down...to...the...embers!!!
Afterwards we came in for the next part of our feast...ice cream "sun"daes.
Then we had our candle lighting. We each have small candles that we light from the big candle. We take turns lighting them. The first one we say something that we love about the time of darkness we have just had ( I have to admit this was a bit of a stretch for me this year). With the second we say something that we love about the light coming back or something we look forward to when the sun returns. The third is for whatever we want, sometimes the boys say something they love about our family, or they like to say things that they are grateful for.
Happy Solstice.
4 comments:
Love your rituals, Nicola! We've traditionally done this sort of thing on New Year's - the letting go, the welcoming the new. I like the idea of burning the papers -- a lot. There are a couple of people in our house who could let go of working too much, too! :)
Merry Christmas to four friends and their blog!!!
Oops, Rebecca, this is Heather's post, not mine. However our evening was similar, with wassailing and feasting. Our fire was indoors - we burned our Yule Log. And we exchanged gifts. So our big celebration is all done and we can kick back and relax while the frenzy of others doing their Christmas shopping continues!
LOL How did I do that???
Bizarre. My frontal lobe is obviously frozen. Or something (which we won't delve into in case we find it's missing altogether!).
Heather, love the letting go ritual!
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