With Thanksgiving (US edition) past, it is now officially the Winter Holiday Season (tm). I'm lucky, in that I've never had any real trouble reconciling my celebration of the winter solstice with family Christmas. It helps that my family has never had a religious Christmas and that most secular yuletide traditions are either pagan-based themselves or interface nicely with my spiritual leanings. Evergreen trees, stars, gift giving, eggnog, candles and cookies can all be nicely pagan without raising the eyebrows of more conservative family members!
It also helps that my husband and I have started hosting Christmas (which I am attempting to rename Yule, as no one present is celebrating the birth of Christ), which means that I am in complete control of the setting. I have the opposite challenge from most Neopagans -- my main struggle is not to break away from Christian traditions, but to be able to insert spirituality into the proceedings at all! I would never do any overt, if for no other reason than because it would be disrespectful of my guests, but I do like to make sure that everything is in line with my personal take on the season. For instance, my decorating focuses on greenery and candles/lights, and there will never be an angel topping my tree. In fact, I don't think there are any angels on my tree at all. I am not 100% sure about that, though. Almost all of my ornaments were gifts from family and friends, and thus serve the purpose of reminding me of my loved ones, so I don't particularly care what they are -- for me it's the memories attached to ornaments, not the ornaments themselves, which is most important.
I'm curious how other people merge Christmas and the Solstice? Or do you keep them entirely separate?
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I'm so glad you can put the two together in your own way and truly celebrate Yule. I personally am a Scrooge but am going to try and change this attitude. I don't like winter at all so that makes even focusing on the winter solstice hard. But I'm really going to try this year! I'm going to focus on pine and lights too. It's hard because my in-laws and extended family on my husband's side don't know about my spirituality so I do pretend. Blech. OK, I have a lot of work to do getting over my Christmas issues.
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