The darkest days of the year have always asked something of us.
Long before we strung electric lights and gathered around brick fireplaces, people across cultures marked the winter solstice — the darkest day of the year. We do so still, not with despair, but as a moment of deliberate action, of invitation. We bring greenery indoors. We light candles in the windows and fires in the hearth. We gather, sing, feast, celebrate. We tell stories about the sun’s return, even though the bulk of winter lies heavy ahead.
Why We Bring Life and Light Indoors
The solstice is neither the end of winter nor its harshest nadir. It is the turning point, the time when decline stops and reversal begins. The days will begin, imperceptibly, to lengthen again. There seems to be some universal human impulse to mark the deepest darkness with light of our own making, and to gather in the good things that sustain us through lean times.
By the second century BCE, Roman households decorated their doors with holly, sacred to the god Saturn. Its red berries and vibrant green foliage set the season’s signature color scheme. Around the same time, Druids were decorating holly trees (though cutting one down would bring bad luck) and bringing in red-and-white speckled fly agaric mushrooms to dry by the fire. Further north, the Norse were hanging mistletoe, with its tiny white berries, under which couples would stop to kiss. Celts and Germanic tribes cut boughs from the evergreen plants around them — ivy, fir, laurel — to symbolize enduring life.
As Christianity crept across the continent, these cultural practices were absorbed by new narratives. The decorated tree was eventually brought indoors and adorned with ornaments, migrating from Germany with Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. It was subsumed into the Christmas tradition and subsequently across the Anglosphere, including the southern hemisphere.
But indigenous midwinter celebrations of fire, music, and revelry were already observed there, in June. The Mapuche of southern Chile and adjacent Argentina celebrate We Tripantu around the June solstice as a new year and renewal of the natural cycle. Each recognizes that midwinter is not a time of death, but of quiet hibernation, preparation, and anticipation.
Why We Light the Dark
In Scandinavia, a giant oak log, the Yule log, was burned to symbolize strength and endurance, its light defying the darkness and promising regrowth and rebirth. A fragment was saved each year to start next year’s fire.
And that, perhaps, is the enduring lesson of these solstice ceremonies of renewal.
Evergreens remain visibly living when deciduous plants appear dead, so they become symbols of continuity, rebirth, and eternal life. But neither are really dead. They are storing away energy, waiting for the light and opportunity to grow to return.
The embers of the Yule log, saved for next year; the hard-won sugars stored up in evergreen boughs. Human beings have always marked the darkest economic and seasonal moments not by denial, but by deliberate acts of renewal — bringing light and living things indoors as a vote of confidence in the future.
Discipline in Dormancy
Human capital works the same way. Periods of stagnation and loss can be times of preparation — if we take responsibility for them. Skills can be sharpened. Habits can be examined. Character can be rebuilt. But none of this happens automatically. Winter only becomes preparation if we choose to treat it as such.
The first signs of recovery are often invisible: better decisions, renewed discipline, a willingness to accept responsibility for one’s future. These do not immediately produce abundance, but they change the trajectory. Compounding works quietly at first.
In economic life, downturns, stagnation, and personal failure function as winter solstices. In the moments when progress is slowest, we might not notice that reversal has already begun. Prosperity does not return automatically — it returns because people act as if it will. We conserve capital, tend embers, make plans, and orient ourselves toward the future. We honor the natural cycles by preparing ourselves to grow again.
Prosperity depends not only on policies or institutions, but on the daily choices of individuals who conserve, invest, and prepare. It depends on people willing to tend embers rather than curse the cold.
In a time when economic anxiety is widespread and faith in the future often feels thin, the solstice offers a bracing reminder. Darkness does not mean directionlessness. Dormancy does not mean decay. And renewal does not require grand gestures — only the discipline to preserve what still lives and the courage to believe that patient effort matters.
The people who celebrated the “longest night” were not naïve. They knew months of cold still lay ahead. They knew crops would not sprout for a long time. Yet they marked the moment anyway, because direction mattered more than speed. After the solstice, as in recession and personal loss, progress begins before comfort returns.
