Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !
I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from 
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - Winter Solstice
I thought I'd write a topical post, as we come up to the solstice on the 21st. Celebration of the solstice, the shortest night in the depths of midwinter before the days gradually start to lengthen again, is one of the oldest ritual events in human history.
In the days when calendars were primarily lunar and years were numbered after the length of reign of rulers, only trained priests or shamans could calculate when the solstice was, and they guarded the knowledge carefully. It is possible that Stonehenge was actually a winter solstice place, even though we nowadays tend to associate it with the summer solstice.
As earlier ages ended and the world became a place of empires, kingdoms and organised religions, quite a few of them adopted the winter solstice as a convenient time for any celebrations they had relating to renewal and rebirth. The dates often slipped a little due to the peculiarities of local calendars. But the Romans celebrated Saturnalia around 17th-19th December, and later on Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (the key celebration in the cult of Sol Invictus) on December 25th. This latter was, of course, then taken over by Christianity.
Is the winter solstice celebrated in your fantasy or sci-fi setting ? Tell me a story about it ! Is it a big, public state-organised thing, more private, or even celebrated in a clandestine manner ? If it's a sci-fi setting with many worlds, is the date set by reference to some ancestral homeworld or perhaps some kind of common galactic date ? How is it celebrated - is it a time of partying and gift-giving, or perhaps more solemn ?
Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.
This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.
Guidelines
I stole these guidelines straight from
- Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
- Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
- Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
- Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
- Prompt replies can be any length.
- AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
- Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.
Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:
It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.
People who have asked to be tagged;
If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂