Solstice Bonfires and Christmas Trees
How San Francisco Witches Celebrate Yule
The first time I plunged naked into the ocean on Winter Solstice, I was one of about a hundred people shedding their clothes for that part of the biggest outdoor ritual of the year. If you go in the ocean, you need to take a buddy, because people have died being abducted by rip tides off San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. (Luckily, we’ve never lost anyone during a Solstice ritual, which we conduct on the Summer Solstice and on Solstice Eve in December.)
My friend Alison was my buddy. She had plunged before.
“It helps if you just charge in. It really helps if you shout ‘I AM A VIKING’ while you go,” she said, and we growled and snarled and whooped our way in to about chest height. Moonlit waves crashed toward us, and we didn’t stay in long before we’d achieved the intention, releasing the parts of ourselves we wanted to leave behind in the dark so we could claim what we wanted to be in the coming year.
It wasn’t even 5 p.m., but it was almost black out, and we ran back up the beach to warm ourselves by the bonfire, where dozens of people were singing a chant about the infinite sun over an 8-count drumbeat. Accent on the 1–4–7, 4/4 with a Middle Eastern feel. I picked up my drum, still naked, and warmed myself with fire, with fervent drumming, with community.
Many neopagan traditions celebrate the Wheel of the Year — the series of eight sabbats based on the solstices, equinoxes, and “cross-quarters” in between — by observing the Celtic god Lugh, the Sun King. As the Wheel story goes, Lugh dies on the peak day of Summer Solstice and sheds his warmth over the harvest. His death lowers the sun in the sky until Winter Solstice, when he is reborn and rises again, bringing longer days. People like to joke about the “sun” being reborn around Christmas, sometimes accompanied by retelling how mistletoe and Christmas trees have their origins in ancient pagan festivals.
Reclaiming, a tradition of witchcraft founded about 35 years ago, doesn’t have any orthodox liturgy around Solstice celebrations, so sometimes we use the story of Lugh and sometimes we don’t.
After we finished up at the beach, some of us congregated at Black Cat, a collective housed in a huge Victorian owned by a few of the founders of Reclaiming. The tables in the kitchen groan under the weight of all the food people bring to share, and everyone takes turns pounding and kneading the dough for fresh cinnamon bread made from scratch and baked just before dawn. There’s a Christmas tree in the living room, a creche on the sideboard filled with dozens of animals come to see the Christ Child, and a menorah on the windowsill; many Reclaiming witches see nothing strange about celebrating several Yuletide traditions at once. Taking up witchcraft doesn’t make everyone discard the traditions of their childhood, and some of our members call themselves “Jewitches” or “Recovering Catholics” who were drawn to witchcraft in part for the similar reverence of ritual and song. Some Reclaiming witches consider themselves Buddhists or atheists when they’re not joining pagan celebrations around Christmas trees.
Solstice is one of many times of year we witches can choose to observe the new year, and on Solstice people gather in the attic ritual room to vision what we want for the coming year. We reach for altered states of consciousness not with substances but with music and chanting and guided meditations, where each person may speak their intention. The last few years, with their heartbreaking rise of racism and intolerance around the world, have inspired a seeming never-ending tradition of prayers for peace and justice. It’s hard to have hope, and yet gathering in groups like these is what we do to find it.
Some people hold vigil all night in the kitchen and the ritual room, and others nap all over the house. Then, on the morning after the longest night, a bevy of witches hikes to the top of Red Rock cliffs in Corona Heights to sing up the sun. We pass around the bread baked overnight and say, as we hand one another a piece, “May you never hunger.”
This year’s Solstice celebration was different. Part of that was the weather: Finally, the winter rainy season has returned to San Francisco. We’ve held Solstice bonfires on the beach before in drizzle and fog and high winds, but this was my first where the rain was heavy the entire time, the wind was sharp, and the air temperature hovered around 45 degrees.
We ritualists gathered on Ocean Beach about 20 after 3 to prepare the fire, even though it was raining. We almost didn’t expect anyone to show, and at 10 til 4 the ritualiists said, let’s start at 4, regardless, and there weren’t many people there.
The person who was supposed to bring the shovel was running late, so we thought we might even skip the fire. We laid some logs in the shape of a campfire on a hunk of concrete that had washed up on the beach, but then a few of us decided we might as well try, and we got the fire lit with large fireplace firestarters, three lighters, and a steady supply of newspaper pulled from pockets and shopping bags. By the time the fire was lit, it was only a few minutes past four, and more and more people had gathered.
Our intention was this:
To stay awake to the ache of injustice
And stoke the fire within and without
To nourish each other at the hearth
We connect and perform our Solstice rite.
One witch said since it was such a small group, we should cast the circle by getting names and asking people to speak into the circle why they had come what was at stake, and the circle got larger and larger, and people stated their intentions: To be together at Solstice, to answer the call of the activist we’d stated in our shared declaration of the ritual intention. And person after person said they had come to plunge. The plunge, remember, is to shed parts of ourselves from the previous year that we wanted to leave behind. It’s a ritual cleansing. And it requires getting naked and very, very cold.
Our witches, many teens among them, made this declaration out loud! They were committing! They were brave! The rest of us were wowed.
We made the fire larger, and by the time we started calling in the spirits of the four directions, we had 50 people standing with us in the wind and rain and cold, all of whom stayed for the whole thing. We heard invocations about justice and trust and truth and activists rising up together to combat oppression. That might not sound spiritual to people outside the Reclaiming community, but this is a tradition of witchcraft founded partly on the idea that activism needs a spiritual core — and that we can bring ourselves to that core by being creative, ecstatic, and not taking ourselves too seriously.
Our Solstice Eve bonfire conjured collective power. It was a lovely ritual, with at more than a dozen people plunging into the Pacific Ocean, and we had we raised energy with songs about sharing the light and honoring the dark.
I was the only drummer on the beach, and for maybe the first time as a solo ritual drummer I felt like I was really, tightly in sync with the energy and will of the singers and the group, and so I worked to sense the energy to take the drumbeat to a heartbeat and then fill the song in again and rise and fall with the group energy, drumming with more and less intensity in a really organic way instead of just feeling the tension of people who wanted the energy to reach a sharp peak — what we call a cone of power — and trying to take us there. It was fully, really magical, and one of my favorite drumming experiences ever.
It’s funny, I almost didn’t bring my drum. It was in storage, and it would have taken me about an hour in the rain to retrieve it, but luckily I remembered Julian—one of our teen witches—had a drum I could borrow, only 2 blocks away from where I was staying, so I borrowed his little kid’s drum — which is exactly the same drum that Starhawk brings to the beach. It’s a little drum with a lot of power nonetheless.
A range of issues from budget to conservation are making the park service that oversees Ocean Beach reconsider their ideas around public bonfires, and we picked a location not obvious to passersby and out of the Snowy Plover Refuge just a few blocks away. Solstice is an observance of change, of the turning of the tide as the light returns. Like many Pagan rituals, the heart of Solstice is about hearth and community, how we hold each other through the year. 2015 was wracked with violence, and even our language around “darkness” has to be considered and reconsidered in a country so plagued by race-based oppression.
This year was different. My friends at the collective house have had a year full of personal trials and pressures from society and community, and they decided to take the year off. There was no all-night vigil, and although people still trudged up the hill in the rain to sing up the sun at dawn this morning, I stayed in bed with the cats that I’m minding over the holidays.
If I plunge into the ocean next year, I’ll bring a buddy, and I’ll say, “It helps if you scream, “I AM A VIKING!” And I’ll take her hand, and we’ll charge forward into the dark, chanting to keep warm.
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