Aren’t you smart to have chosen December for your wedding! Your celebration will match perfectly the festive mood of the holidays. But could there be another reason why this time of year feels so right, one stirring deep in your DNA? Quite possibly!
What is it about the month of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year for those who live north of the equator? In ancient times, our ancestors celebrated the solstice with a long night of revelry and feasting. Living closer to the rhythms of Nature, they understood that the solstice marked the beginning of lengthening days, quickening fields and warmer temperatures. Soon, they could crawl out of their huts, have babies and start to live again. Spring — and hope — was on the horizon.
Some say the winter solstice is the most magical time for a wedding because of this connection to the life cycle of the earth and to one of the oldest of human rituals. They believe it is the perfect time in the calendar to speak vows to your beloved. If you have a December wedding planned, your Justice of the Peace will help you weave allusions to the winter solstice into your ceremony. For example, your vows might be: :
We commit ourselves to each other in a time of winter, but the love that brings us here today is the warmest thing I have ever known in my life. I give myself to you as your husband/wife from this day forward and know that a new life lies before us. More vows here.
Your wedding readings too can be chosen to acknowledge the restorative aspect of winter and the renewal of light that the solstice promises. One possibility is an excerpt from the poem Light of All Lights by Gajanan Mishra:
Love is the light of all lights
Where there is truth there is love
Where there is love there is light
Light is truth, truth is light
And it is beyond darkness beyond ignorance….
I love you, you are my love
You are my light
You are my truth.
A winter solstice wedding is an opportunity to enrich the words of your ceremony with traditions that reach back to our oldest human impulses and connect us spiritually to Mother Earth and Father Sun. Your JP will know how to make your December wedding resonate with the assurance of the coming of spring and of new life.
After all, “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” [Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley.]
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