International Living, Marriage & Travel

There are many festivals in December, St. Nicholas Day, St. Lucia Day, Winter Solstice, then Christmas!

For Chinese, we like to make tang yuan or balls of glutinous rice on Winter Solstice. It symbolizes reunion. We would like to have the family members gather together, enjoy the dinner and also the tang yuan. I always heard from the old people, Winter Solstice is actually more important than the Chinese New Year, though I don't really understand why.

Do you celebrate Winter Solstice? How do you celebrate this day?

The winter solstice in the states is December 21, and a lot of places celebrate winter solstice, which is the shortest period of daylight and the longest night of the year. They do have a lot of these winter solstice celebrations going on, but I think it gets overshawdowed by the Christmas festivities. Some of these include, The Children's Museum Bonfire in Santa Fe(New Mexico)- they host an annual bonfire to celebrate the winter solstice.

This occasion called Winter Solstice is new to me. What we have for December is Christmas but there are other occasions that are not very popular but related to Christmas. There is the feast of Christ the King in the last week of November that is celebrated with a procession. On December 8 is the Immaculate Conception in honor of the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ.

No, as a Filipino we don't celebrate winter solstice since we only have 2 seasons over here. Around the end of the year we just celebrate Christmas and New Year, but with colder weather.