Holidays and festivals are rich with meaning and purpose, lending themselves easily as a time and space of tradition and ritual. In honor of this holiday season and the diversity of families we have at Rose Rock, we will take the next several weeks to feature some of their traditions and rituals. These may be traditions of long ago, cherished and kept since childhood, or they may be freshly created for our own children. They may be centered in one festival or holiday, or they may be simple rituals that uplift our daily lives during this time of year. All of them are special ways we create our family cultures. We invite you to relish in them as we do and be inspired to begin your own.
Winter Solstice marks the shortest period of daylight in the year but with each day there is more and more light. This is not a holiday that my family celebrated growing up, but it is one that Rob wanted to bring into our family and I loved the idea of having something that is intimate to just our household, separate from the hustle and bustle that is the rest of the holiday season. So far we haven’t filled this day with plans and anticipation, we simply make sure to acknowledge it. We make an effort to have a quiet evening at home, with a simply cooked meal. The main goal is to turn off all the other things that can pull at us on any given evening and to focus on one another as a family.
We have added small rituals along the way, really just inviting one another to contribute ideas to what might make the night special for us as a family. Some have stuck and others haven’t. In the past we’ve baked something sweet like cookies, pies, or cakes. Sometimes we take a nighttime walk through the neighborhood to look at holiday lights. One year we all got new pajamas to wear and we wore them while watching the sunset on the back porch. The past two years we have exchanged books and chocolates.
The most long-standing ritual is to choose a live plant on this evening and dub it the “solstice tree.” In the past this has been a number of plant types depending on what we can find. Of course we’ve purchased small conifers before, but one time we brought in a patch of moss from our yard. We’ve also used collard tree starters for the vegetable garden. This year we purchased a fig tree. We keep this plant alive indoors all winter as a reminder of life, that the earth will warm again to bountiful times in the spring. When it is warm enough, we plant our solstice tree outside in the garden.
Written by Shayna Pond, wife to Rob Vollmar and mother to Eleanor and, their new baby, Liliana.