Well, that's another year up the Judge's Arse.

Solstice comes from a Latin word which translates as “sun stands still”. The winter solstice in this year of Grace, 2023, the moment when the Earth's axis is furthest from the sun will occur around 03.27 GMT on December 22nd. As the Lifers say, "that's another year up the Judge's Arse."

It is the longest night of the year. People used to encourage the sun to return by lighting fires - 

the Yule log, feasting and drinking (feasting and drinking seem to be central to all early religious celebrations). However, here in Orkney, it has been blowing a gale for weeks, probably months and possibly years. So I don't think there'll be any pagans dancing round the Ring of Brodgar or the Stones of Stennes this year. Most unlikely that the setting sun will light up the Maeshowe chambered tomb

as it's been sleeting, hailing or snowing for days, probably weeks and possibly months.

All the more important to encourage the sun back again. Maybe light a candle against the dark?

mr ishmael:  ......

There was a point in living memory, maybe before the Labour Party got it's Equity card, when the changing seasons still retained some power over us, when they were marked and celebrated; hints of the pagan, of riotous, Jesus-free sexuality, of the elemental; Maydays and Solstices, Harvest Homes; ancient, starborne, prehistoric survival rituals - which had been colonised, hi-jacked by Pope Nazi's predecessors, parceled-up with Feast Days, Saints' Days and Guilty Days - marked periodic awarenesses of the cyclicality of creation, of death and renewal, or of, as the Noncing Monsignors would have it, the craft of the Divine Watchmaker; you know, He who's gonna forever roast your arse if you don't do as we, His kindly minders, say. Dominus vobiscum.

These Stone-Age festivals, these seasonal forebodings, joys and obeisances formed a truly British, truly European - or Northern White - culture, long before John Bull and immeasurably more valid, more connected than the morbid, touchstone, tribal posturings of the SNP, the BNP, Plaid Cymru, Ulster's pestilential Kneecappers and sour-faced, joyless Orange undertakers, all rooted not in Earth, Water, Fire and Air but in hangings, arson, rape, torture, mayhem and martyrdom, Christian Age alpha male shit.

As the Green Man carved surreptitiously by apostate joiners in ostensibly Christian Saxon and Norman Churches hung-on, in hiding, these pagan seasonal customs clung, too, Bowdlerised and adapted, the Furry Dance, the joyful Mayday cock-worship, a clandestine, Earth-worshipping Resistance movement; the ringed stones of Wiltshire and Gloucester and Orkney attracting all sorts, freaks and Wiccans and libertines but many more just vaguely aware of bigger, eternal patterns, of a pre-programmed, stellar air-conditioner, whirring through Time, ventilating Life.

For the longest time, perhaps until the gaudy arriviste iconoclasm of Thatcher's brigandage, we - maybe unknowingly - heard the old prayers and feared the old gods.