Preparations are underway in southwest Wisconsin for Circle Sanctuary’s 50th annual Christmas celebration. For the pagan members the church serves, it marks the winter solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.

On Sunday evening, High Priestess Selena Fox gathered spiritual leaders on Zoom to light candles and honor the full moon.

“We draw the power of the moon into this sacred circle, into ourselves and into this season,” she said before she began to sing. “Christmas joy, Christmas joy, Christmas spirit, welcome here.”

She asked viewers to remember the joy of sacred plants of the season: evergreen trees, holly, ivy and mistletoe.

On Saturday, she and several dozen others gathered around a campfire in the sanctuary’s nature reserve and tossed a decorated Christmas log into the fire, meant to symbolize the returning sun.

Fox is a Wiccan priestess, but Circle Sanctuary encompasses a range of pagan traditions and focuses on a spiritual connection with nature. In the dead of winter, Fox said Christmas is a solemn occasion to sow seeds of hope for the coming spring.

“It is truly a powerful time for personal renewal, for renewing bonds with family and friends, for humanity and for the planet as a whole,” Fox said.

Fox said you don’t have to be a pagan to celebrate Christmas. Everyone can celebrate this day with a walk in nature and enjoy the beauty of winter.

Paganism is on the rise in the United States, particularly among young people, according to Helen Berger, a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School who studies pagan communities. Berger said this partly reflects Americans’ move away from organized religion and toward less hierarchical spiritual practices.

“They feel like it doesn’t meet their individual or personal needs and are exploring alternative spirituality,” she said. “We have a lot of individualism in our culture, in our society, and here we have it in a religious or spiritual form.”

Many Pagans, including Wiccans, practice magic and refer to themselves as witches.

Berger said the solstice is a crucial time in pagan communities.

“We’re diving into this really deep darkness,” she said. “But we have to focus on the fact that the sun is slowly but surely coming back. So there is this external joy of the light.”

Circle of the Stag in Wichita, Kansas, a 10-year-old Wiccan coven with eight members, has spent this week preparing for the solstice.

At home in Wichita, High Priest Orin Hart prepares for the annual Circle of the Stag Christmas ritual. Hart, who uses the pronouns they/them, holds up a long braided cord decorated with wooden charms.

“We call it a cingulum. We wear it around our waist when we perform a ritual to bind our spirit to us, but also to prevent anything from harming us,” Hart said. “During a ritual, you might find yourself in a…trance-like state. You don’t want anything to catch you while you’re having an out-of-body experience.”

For this year’s ritual, the coven is joining another local pagan group. Up to 30 people gather around a fire. Through storytelling and dance, Hart and another leader will lead a reenactment of the Wild Hunt, a story about guiding souls who died during the year to the afterlife.

“Sometimes we do meditations,” Hart said. “We are doing a lot of exercise this year especially for this ritual.”

Rituals begin with establishing a sacred circle: trace its outline with a wand or dagger and cleanse the space with smoke and saline.

“Once we’re in that circle, one of the things we’re saying is that we’re in a place that’s not a place and a time that’s not a time and that we’re between worlds,” Hart said.

In this sacred space, Hart says, members deepen their spiritual connections to themselves and each other — and celebrate the return of the sun.

As in the Circle Sanctuary, the Yule Log plays an important role in the Circle’s solstice ritual. Members hold portions of last year’s minutes that bear symbols of things they wanted to take with them into the new year.

“And then we will throw them into the fire to release the things we took with us this year,” Hart said. “We then create a new (Christmas log) that we carry with us for the next year.”