Big Community Solstice

Relevant quote from the original NYC Ritual Report [LW · GW]:

My family’s Christmas Eve celebration is one of my favorite parts of the year. The extended family gathers. We have a big feast. Then 20+ people huddle up and sing songs and tell stories for hours. I don’t believe in the literal messages of these rituals, but they have a power to them that I rarely see outside of religious-inspired works of art. They feel timeless and magical even though most Christmas carols have only existed for 50 years or so. The repetition of them each year grants them ritual strength. And the closeness I feel with my family grants them warmth.

Together, all these things are precious.

I didn’t realize how precious, though, until the year I invited a friend of mine to the Christmas Eve party. Her first reaction amused me: “Wait, you guys literally sit around a fire and sing Christmas carols? Like, in movies?” Her second reaction, as the night ended, was even more amusing: “Oh my god, I had no idea Christmas could be so awesome!” But I knew what she meant, and it was accompanied with the realization that NOT everybody got to have experiences like this.

And that made Christmas Eve all the more special. It also made me realize how ridiculous it is that I only get to have that experience once a year.

That desire nagged at me a few years, and it was accompanied by another nagging dissatisfaction: That I didn’t really believe in the words of the songs. They had power, generated by the magnitude of the songwriter’s belief, and given lyric form by carefully honed skill. But they weren’t true, and the falsehood itched at the back of my mind. Not because of the songs themselves, but because there weren't other songs, equally beautiful and with the same cultural weight, that were about things that I truly believed in.

Christmas has a lot of nice things (presents, decorations, etc), many of which pre-date Christian influence. But one of the things that was specifically nice to me about "small Christmas" was that it did have a ritual arc, which included bits that had memetic depth. I just... wanted to have that, but with memetic depth that I actually endorsed.

(I already posted it to the facebook thread of Ray)

I live in Berlin where we had our 7th Solstice this year (technically the first three years where in another city, but there's continuity).

I think this year we were around 17ish people.

It's neither big nor small in your categories but it does what it's does what we want. On person who was their the first time noted afterwards something along the lines of it having been the day in their lives that felt the most meaningful to them.

A majority of the people in our local community spend Christmas with their families and the 24th is not a day where there would be enough interest to have an event with rationalists in Berlin.

I don't think you can hold a Christmas like event every year at the 21.12 either. There are public holidays that enable the 24 (or 25/26) to be a practical date that you don't have for newly created events.

The problem of what those people who don't have a family with whom they can be at the official Christmas date can't be solved by having a solstice event at the 21. If those people want to not be alone they need an event with friends at that actual date.

The 3-chapter ark and it's narrative feels integral to our event and has the value of being refined tradition to me. I wouldn't want to break the tradition we build up by changing the name around.

(upvoted, although this is a rare case where I expect to do my commenting on FB instead of LessWrong, partly because that's where most of the discussion already is, and a lot of it has high social context)

I wonder if it'd be a good idea to have something like "Rationalist Christmas" or Rationalist Christmas traditions: things that build on the existing holiday, e.g. Rationalist decorate their trees with depictions of 12 virtues of rationality, Rationalists listen to and sing the X-Days of X-Risk.