Holly Days is a winter holiday that remixes the various religious celebrations into fanciful twelve-day holiday that starts on the Winter Solstice, and ends on New Years Day. Each of these days is represented by an principal aimed at improving the quality of our collective lives. The Twelve Principals are described in more detail here.
While our family developed Holly Days as an intentionally secular holiday, there are inevitable spiritual connotations to be drawn from embedding it so firmly in nature and the cycles of the earth’s seasons. We have incorporated aspects from various seasonal holidays into a personalized mash-up of our favorite traditions, taking ritual aspects of all sorts of winter-timed observances and trying to meld them into a single, fun and sensible tradition. The various holidays of Yule, Saturnalia, Christmas Eve, Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanza, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day and even Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah have all been light-heartedly folded into our Holly Days.
We invite you to join us in this mix and match mash-up and to include all your favorite bits to create your own authentic celebrations and develop your own family traditions. Holly Days has not only been fun for our family but it has lead us, surprisingly, to a deeper and more spiritually significant celebration.
The complete essay that describes how we started down this path a couple decades ago is included here as Nesdon’s Rant. For the last few years we have also added posts sharing our reflections on the principals for each of that year’s Holly Days.
WHY HOLLY?
Since the Winter Solstice is the moment when the sun’s apparent movement south ends, and it begins to move back northwards, we see the celebration of light as a central theme. Lighted decor, candles and fireworks are appropriate symbols of this celebration of the return of the sun.
Of course almost all life on earth (I guess those chemoautotrophs will have to think up their own rituals) is nourished by the sun’s energy and so that light also makes a great symbol of our shared life. It is pretty amazing to remember, at any time of year, that every other person on earth is your literal cousin, that we, even every beast and bug, are all related–sharing the same magical and mysterious spark of life that has been passed, from parent to child for the whole history of this wondrous thing we call life on earth.
And so to celebrate how this life we share has managed to overcome every freezing winter, every cataclysmic challenge to its existence, we see the evergreens and especially the bright red berries of fruiting winter plants like Holly, Toyon, and Pyracantha as symbols of this magnificent, shared and indomitable life.
Red runs in every one of our veins, as it does on these glad fruit, and so we bring them into our homes as a remembrance of this holy connection.
This return of the sun, with its promise of the fecund seasons of spring and summer, is a time for renewal. When the canopy of a tree is built anew, when the rains and snow wash away the dust, and the year resets to day one.
HOLLY DAYS 