Winter Solstice Ritual Kit

A hand-built kit for the longest night, assembled here in limited numbers. Everything in it is for one job: closing a year out on purpose rather than letting it trail off.

The solstice is the one sabbat that needs no belief to work on you. It is an astronomical event: the shortest day of the year, when for several days around the twenty-first the sun rises and sets at almost the same point on the horizon before turning back. Here is the part almost nobody knows. The earliest sunset is not the solstice; at our latitude it already happened, around the eighth of December. And the latest sunrise does not come until early January. The solstice sits between them, the day with the least light in it, with the evenings already lengthening and the mornings still getting worse. Everything every northern culture built around this comes from watching it happen and deciding to mark it.

The Yule goat in the kit is the piece people ask about. It is Scandinavian, the julbock, made of straw from the last sheaf of the harvest and kept through the winter, and it is much older than the modern holiday it now decorates. In Sweden they still put up a forty-three foot one in Gävle every year at the start of Advent, and people still try to burn it down; it has been destroyed or damaged well over forty times since 1966, which is arguably the most authentic part of the whole tradition.

Work it in order: clear with the sage, shift the air with the palo santo, anoint and light the green candle for what you want growing, put the salt down as a boundary on what you are not carrying forward, and keep the pine cone and the goat out until spring.

What Is In It

Yule goat, white sage, palo santo, a green candle, matches and a glass jar, anointing oil, a pine cone and red salt.

Good to Know

Limited edition, built by hand here, so contents vary slightly between kits and once they are gone they are gone. Never leave a burning candle unattended and burn the sage and palo santo in a heatproof dish.

Try It With

The Yule collection for everything else the season needs. An abalone shell to burn over, and black salt if you want a heavier boundary than the red. More in ritual kits.