In which I call something a paradox that, like most “paradoxes”, isn’t really. But is nonetheless a confusing problem.

After every Winter Solstice I’ve run, I get people asking me “so what’s for Summer Solstice?” It seems like an obvious question – clearly the Winter Solstice is just a small piece of a much larger puzzle. One holiday does not a culture make. And on the flipside, it’s helpful to build off of something already familiar. So a Summer Solstice feels like the obvious next step… right?

Honestly, that doesn’t feel right to me.

What are holidays for again?

Holidays serve a few key purposes – they connect us to our community, they connect us to ideas. Depending on their nature, they may give us an excuse to celebrate and have fun, or they may give us an excuse to be calm and contemplative. The generalized case of this is “give us an excuse to have an experience that society doesn’t normally encourage us to have.”

Used to be, there wasn’t a giant economy churning out more novel things to entertain us than we could ever possibly consume. Used to be, you had more or less one culture per-town, and your community ran a few big holidays per year.

Then we started having melting-pot (“salad bowl?”) metropolitan centers where we had lots of different cultures clashing, along with more and more people/companies/movements churning out novel experiences.[1] Now there are huge numbers of big parades, live-action theater events, conferences about art and science, a dozen new movies each week, as well as numerous small meetups catering to random niche interests.

The positive side is we get access to all these experiences. The downside is that we may lose access to the particular experience “my entire tribe is coming together to celebrate this thing we all care deeply about.”

Humanist culture has the potential to fill that void. But to successfully do that, it needs to create something people go to instead of all the other fun, exciting experiences that already exist.

The Brighter Than Today Solstice was successful because it was doing something that literally wasn’t being done – creating a holiday experience that had a story, had good original music and good art that tied together to create a deliberate experience. It also wasn’t afraid to get dark and explore sadness.

The Summer Solstice Paradox

Winter feels like a time of huddling in the darkness, drawing people close. I wan...