An Activity to Celebrate Solstice with Your family.

To connect with the sacred stillness of the longest night of the year, this activity guides us to create a symbolic, toy-sized cave with our children.

This quiet, holy, protective cave will shelter Mother Earth and the Sun Child, symbolically reborn the night of December 21, the winter solstice. The cave will be filled with the helpers and protectors a family needs to grow in love and justice in the year ahead. This activity comes from the Earth-centered spiritual tradition and harkens to the Christian creche scene. It can be adapted to your own path.

This activity comes from the book, Celebrating the Great Mother: A Handbook of Earth-Honoring Activities for Parents and Children, by Cait Johnson and Maura D. Shaw (Destiny Books, 1995). The book can be found on used books sites for very affordable prices.

Celebrating the Great Mother authors Johnson and Shaw invite readers to make a cave. Outdoors, the cave might be made of rocks or bricks.

Indoors, you might build your cave out of toy blocks, or even stacked books.

Your cave should have three walls and a roof and be big enough inside to shelter a handful of figures of your choosing, and a couple of votive candles (flame or electric, depending on location and materials).

Make this a family project. It might take a few minutes, or a few days, to get the cave just right.

Next, you’re going to add figures to go inside the cave. The cave is the shelter for the Earth Mother and the Sun Child, so a parent-and-child duo goes in first. In my family, we use favorite dolls who aren’t exactly reserved for this purpose, but who, over the years, have come to feel like the right characters to us. Johnson and Shaw suggest you might also make the two figures out of wax, wood, clay, papier mâché, etc.

Once the parent-and-child figures are placed in the cave, you can surround them with other characters who can help and protect them. Fantastical creatures? Plants and animals? Magicians? Healers? Warriors? Teachers? Each family member might choose a character to represent themselves, too; in this way, we can all see ourselves in the powerful role of helper.

Make sure all the figures you want will fit, but then bundle them up and keep them in a box or basket until the evening of the Solstice.

Then, just after sunset on the evening of the Winter Solstice, make an event out of processing the figures into the cave all together.

The authors recommend decorating the cave with evergreen sprigs at this time and placing your unlit candles in and around the cave. When you’ve finished, let a moment of silence fall. You might say something such as, “Even in the stillness and dark, each of us has light to share.” Next, one at a time, you can light your candles.

Afterward, it may feel right to share a favorite holiday drink such as apple cider or hot cocoa. Or you might sit in the dark and enjoy simply watching the flickering candles through a window or across the room. Times of birth, like the Sun Child at the Winter Solstice, are often times of intermittent celebration and stillness, so let this activity bring both into your evening.