At the last minute, I was able to visit the Bay Area Solstice last weekend.

This was the first time I’d been to a Solstice that I wasn’t personally running, and… wow, it was heartwarming. I arrived on the day of their final rehearsal and preparations. There were some people setting up lights and decorations. There were people tying red ribbons around candles, preparing to give them to celebrators the next day. The choir was practicing their songs.

There was also some bickering about how to do the decorations and what music to sing. But it was adorable holiday bickering, and it actually gave me a sense that “this is a real thing that real people come together to celebrate, bringing their own strong opinions about how to make it beautiful.”

The Bay Solstice gotten written up as an article published (among other places) in the Washington Post. Meanwhile, another Solstice last weekend was going on in Seattle.

This upcoming weekend, two more Big Solstices are happening – one on Sunday the 21st in San Diego, a collaborative effort put on by the Coalition of Reason.

And the one I’m running personally in New York City. Last Monday we had our final musical rehearsal, and I got chills just listening to some of the pieces. We have a new song called Stardust, and a new arrangement of our “classic” song Bitter Wind Blown that I’m extremely proud of.

I’m looking forward to this weekend. Looking forward to talking to other organizers and learning how to iterate and improve this for next year. Looking forward – where I feel pretty confident there will be plenty of Secular Solstices that happen on their own, that are evolving in directions I didn’t predict but which meet the needs of their communities.