The Unfinished Altar of Yule
A Winter Solstice devotion to fire, boundaries, and staying human in the dark season
The sanctuary is quiet.
Crystals still catch what little winter light manages to spill in. My divination cards are stacked nearby, waiting. I don’t reach for them right away. I sit first. I breathe. I let my body catch up to my spirit.
Meaning feels close right now—and so does exhaustion. Both crowd into the same breath. One side of me wants to craft a story, the other aches for silence. Some days, they reach a truce. Other days, they tangle until I’m numb, scrolling as a way to disappear from my own skin.
Yule, in its steady way, calls me back to center.
It feels old, rooted beneath the modern trappings of December that I grew up with. Yule has memory. It remembers midwinter as a living threshold rather than a sales pitch. It belonged to people who watched the sky for the returning sun because survival demanded reverence.
The winter solstice is the longest night, the shortest day. The sun bows low, and then, almost imperceptibly, the light begins its slow, stubborn return. Minutes at a time. That gentle pace, not the world’s hurry, is what I trust.
The world keeps trying to sell a shinier narrative. You’re meant to emerge from the darkness reborn, glimmering with clarity, ready to take on the next thing. Spirituality becomes a marketing plan. Transformation is measured in checklists and captioned for applause.
Meanwhile, my nervous system is tired. My work and my sense of self have shifted beyond the comfort of neat explanations. Our country hums with a constant, brittle dread and some days it feels like trying to live inside a siren. I’m reminded, again and again, that tending to your own truth is both an act of resistance and survival.
So I sit at my altar, and I let it show me what is true, without rushing me into a conclusion.
There’s a blank canvas leaning close, both promise and pressure. My creativity still lingers, but so does uncertainty. The self I’m becoming hasn’t quite spoken its name.
A stack of herbalism books waits, reminding me that the body is a wild, worthy landscape. I still believe in slow remedies, in the healing of everyday ritual, in learning to listen—especially when everything feels worn thin. Making tea. Turning pages. Beginning again. It’s a form of devotion to keep returning, even when I’m weary. (And even when my spicy brain tells me it is time to jump to something new and shiny.)
A statue of Mother Earth stands sentinel, bearing the unbearable: the grief and the hope, the unspoken ache of the country, the constant news-cycle churn, the stubborn faith that truth will rise. She carries what feels too heavy for me alone.
And then, the photo. My mom on her wedding day to my dad, face lit with joy. That image is an altar of its own: love and lineage, memory and loss all tangled up. Winter makes time thin; the past presses so close I can almost touch it.
Together, these objects do not create a Pinterest-worthy scene. They create a mirror. Nervous system. Work. Country. Grief. Hope. Each finds a place here.
I live inside the tension of all three. Some days, I find a little grace. Other days, I stare at the wall, or I disappear into busyness and burn out. Sometimes, I go silent, burrowing into a book, letting the world recede.
Still, I come back to Yule.
Because Yule is honest about what midwinter requires: protection over performing. The turn of the year asks for humility. Darkness is a necessary, sacred part of the cycle.
Yule survives beneath all the modern noise, especially in the old northern countries where its name still lingers. Even as centuries of Christian observance layered over these ancient rituals, the thread remained: people gathering, feasting, telling stories, blessing the darkness as a hinge the year swings upon.
This is where my Unfinished Altar finds its voice.
This altar is unfinished, because I am unfinished. Life refuses to be boxed up and judged for how complete it looks from the outside. December’s culture is obsessed with closure—“close the year strong,” “be your best self,” “wrap it up and move on.” Even spiritual practice gets hijacked, turned into something to prove or display. The result? Exhaustion, shame, disconnection.
In my opinion, this is a form of cultural harm. One that convinces us to commodify even our healing, to treat our inner lives as projects for public consumption, to make performance out of grief and growth. We’re sold the myth that stillness is laziness, that unfinished means unworthy, that our only value is in what we can show.
But I am not interested in magic that demands I be impressive. What I want is warmth, truth, and protection. Meaning that requires neither spectacle nor speed. If my only devotion this season is to stay soft and real, I’ve done enough.
When I look at Yule through the lens of ancestral memory, I think of hearths, not hashtags. Fire wasn’t a metaphor. It was survival: warmth, light, defense, the anchor of a home that held everything. Fire taught boundaries. A flame welcomes with care, burns back what is reckless, and teaches respect by simply being itself.
That’s the medicine I need now. I’m worn out from spiritual checklists, exhausted by rituals done out of obligation, depleted by the pressure to “start fresh” while the world itself is coming undone. I don’t want to be sold a bigger dream when what I crave is to feel safe in my own skin.
This is the time of year when so many people try to force transformation. I’m more interested in truth. In the kind of quiet work that lets me exist without abandoning myself.
So my altar becomes both mirror and refuge. Yule becomes a language that says:
Tend your fire.
Guard what matters.
You do not owe the world a polished ending.
Yule asks for a devotion that fits the body and the day: lighting a candle when the air feels too heavy, saying no because you need to rest, letting yourself grow quiet when the world peddles urgency. If your nervous system has been tight all year, you know how radical it is to claim stillness, to let yourself slow down and stay soft. Sometimes, the silence brings the fears closer. Sometimes, the long nights call up old questions:
What am I doing with this life?
Where is my energy going?
Who am I when I’m not striving to impress?
What do I want to protect?
Yule doesn’t demand answers. It opens a threshold where questions are honored just as they are.
This is what the solstice means to me. The longest night is not a finale. It’s a turning point. A slow, unglamorous return of the light. I want to live like that: quiet shifts, slow reawakening, no need to reinvent myself overnight.
Here, the unfinished altar is its own act of defiance. I refuse to treat my life like a quarterly report or my healing like a side hustle. I reject the idea that exhaustion is a personal flaw when the world is engineered for depletion and distraction.
So I sit in my sanctuary, letting the altar hold what I can’t fix yet. The crystals flicker as dusk settles in. The blank canvas leans, waiting for me to find my way back to creativity, in my own time. The herbalism books rest beside a steaming cup of tea. The Mother Earth statue gathers my longing for a kinder world and holds it with a steady, ancient grace. My mother’s photo glows in the candlelight, softening the ache and bringing memory close.
The altar, unfinished, holds space for all of it—uncertainty, hope, fury, love. It isn’t neat, and it doesn’t have to be. I just keep tending the fire. A flame asks only that you show up, exactly as you are.
If you need a companion for this threshold, I made something for us.
Beginning on the Winter Solstice and unfolding through the New Year, The 12 Nights of Yule is a free guided journal and ritual companion designed to help you move through this turning with intention, reverence, and renewal. Inside you’ll find daily themes, soulful prompts, and simple rituals. Space to lay down what’s complete, gather your wisdom, and plant gentle seeds for what comes next.
No one needs to be remade by January. We only need meaning, night by night.
You can get the free 12 Nights of Yule Journal here:
Tonight, if you feel unfinished, know this:
You are allowed to be in process. You are allowed to be soft, to be human, to rest from performing.
May your fire be steady, your boundaries clear, and may the slow returning light remind you that gentle is still forward.
As I look around, the crystals catch one last glint of dusk, the candle burns steadily, and the statue keeps holding the world—just as we are, unfinished and worthy.
Love today,
Heather 🌸