My Mom’s Song and the Longest Night

Dear Ones, 

As we approach the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year and the deepest inward turn, I’ve been listening closely to what wants to be offered without refinement.

This week, that offering came as my mother’s song.

Below is a short reflection I wrote, along with a simple re-recording of A Winter’s Carol.

My Mom’s Song and the Longest Night

The Winter Solstice arrives quietly.
Not with certainty or brightness, but as a pause —
the longest night of the year,
a still point where something ancient turns,
even if we cannot yet see the change.

This week, I’ve been thinking about my mother.

My mom was a singer, a songwriter, and a poet.  She was a priestess in her own way.  Music moved through her as naturally as breath. She wrote a lullaby called A Winter’s Carol, a Christmas song that lives less in triumph and more in tenderness. It speaks of cold and hunger, of not knowing why warmth appears, and of a light that arrives gently, wrapped in vulnerability.

When I was very small, she would sing it each year at church, in community spaces, sometimes just for us. It was one of my favorite moments of the season. I can still feel it in my body: the quiet, the expectancy, the way something softened without needing explanation.

I grew up in a house filled with music. Singing was how my family prayed, celebrated, and made meaning. My mother’s voice was central:  strong, honest, unafraid of complexity. When she sang A Winter’s Carol, it wasn’t performance. It was offering.

The song itself holds winter gently. It names cold and hunger without despair. It allows warmth to arrive without explanation. It questions dominant narratives and refuses easy answers — even as it gestures toward the birth of Jesus as light beyond category, beyond color, beyond certainty. A tear on the cheek. A smile. A presence that does not demand belief so much as attention.

Over the years, this song became part of how I understood the season itself.
The Solstice not as triumph, but as threshold.
Not brightness, but trust.
The longest night as a place where something turns quietly, without announcement.

This year, as the Solstice approached, I felt called to sing my mother’s song again. Not to improve it. Not to reinterpret it. Simply to let it pass through me as memory, as gratitude, as love.

I recorded it simply, standing in front of the tree. Just a voice and a song that has lived in my body for decades.

It feels fitting to share it now, at the darkest point of the year.

The light does not return all at once.
It arrives quietly.
Through memory.
Through voice.
Through love offered without revision.

I’m sharing the video below as a Solstice offering — not because it is perfect, but because it is true.

To my mother.
To the longest night.
To the warmth that appears when we don’t quite know why.

Thank you.
I love you.