Narrative

I decided this year to run my own Secular Solstice at my house.

In 2014, I was a part of Ray Arnold’s Solstice choir and also helped with some music planning in NYC, and then in some subsequent years I participated in various ways. Most recently, I joined for Solstice in 2022 in DC, which Maia Werbos ran. This one was pretty good, but it was long (2h-ish) and held in a Quaker meeting hall. I think (hazy memory) that 30-ish people came. It was well organized, but the venue wasn’t full and the amount of empty space made it feel a little cold as a result.

This is the first time I ever organized one. I hadn’t heard of anyone else organizing Solstice in DC this year so wasn’t competing with other Solstices, but I also didn’t send out invites to a huge crowd – it was mostly just friends plus my mailing list for house invitations. I was aiming for attendance of 20-30, and it ended up being close to 20.

Every year that I’ve participated has been meaningful for me: taking a zoomed-out view of human history, and evoking awe at our place in the universe and yearning to create a brighter future. I wanted to make it happen, and I figured I could do it on my own if necessary without too much prep.

But I figured I’d ask for help anyway. Josh Korr runs well-attended singalongs in DC and I know him well, so I asked if he would be interested in helping with the music planning for Solstice and he agreed. This turned out to be a great decision. Josh has a lot of experience working on participatory music and his thoughts were super on point. I also got some other volunteers to sing, including Abi Olvera, who was excited to lead Next Right Thing (and did a great job!)

I specifically wanted to make a few changes from the versions that I’d previously experienced, and shorten the ceremony to under an hour.

Order of ceremony

Here’s what we ended up with:

Dusk

  • Welcome speech
  • Sing: Time Wrote the Rocks
  • Sing: Sound of Silence

Night

  • Sing: Bold Orion
  • Sing: Bitter Wind Blown
  • Tradeoffs speech
  • Sing: The Next Right Thing

Dawn

  • Sing: Brighter Than Today
  • 500 Million, Not A Single One More
  • Sing: Hymn to Breaking Strain
  • Pale Blue Dot
  • Sing: Hard Times Come Again No More

Setlist things I opted not to do:

  • I don’t love the transhumanist and far-future aspects of Solstice (5000 Years, bits of When I Die and Uplift). I wanted to keep it humanist, with a lot of introspection, and some looking towards a better near-term future.
  • I find the goofy Solstice versions of carols/folk songs slightly off-putting (Necronomicon, When I Die, X Days of X-Risk). They can be good singalongs, but don’t help with setting the mood that I was aiming for.
  • I also find that there’s a lot of repetition of the “stone age / industrial age / future age” humanist progression (Brighter Than Today, Endless Lights, Uplift) and so I cut down to one song with that shape.
  • I didn’t like asking participants to repeat any litanies (Litany of Tarski) so I didn’t include one of those.

Setlist things I prioritized:

  • I wanted to write something for the darkest moment that was grim and resonated with my own moral priorities. I wrote the “Tradeoffs” speech first and built the rest of the ceremony around it. My goal was to highlight suffering in the modern age a bit more, specifically animals, but other current instances of human suffering as well. (I’ll link it here if the Solstice team accepts my pull request)
  • I made sure to include Brighter Than Today. It’s one of my favorite songs of the season, and the ceremony is centered on it. Seems hard to have Solstice without it.
  • Bold Orion stuck in my head from the last time I attended Solstice, and it’s a really nice song. My house also has a rooftop from which you can actually see Orion, and I was thinking we would go up and look at the stars and sing this song before the darkest moment. (We didn’t end up going outside in the end)
  • Bitter Wind Blown is another song that feels poignant – it’s not that musically interesting but I still like it and feel it is an important song for the ceremony, it seems to hit the right mood right before the darkest moment.
  • Beyond those, I wanted to pick out songs and speeches I both enjoyed and felt were representative of the themes: Science and rationality; darkness, spookiness and danger of winter; progress and welfare; our place in the universe; our moral responsibility.

Logistics

I ended up doing most of the logistics myself: I wrote a speech, designed and iterated on the setlist, solicited music help, organized two musical rehearsals, made the invite and YouTube playlist, designed and printed handouts, and made a lyrics slide deck. This was all-in about probably 10-12 hours’ work. I didn’t have to buy anything, and I didn’t do any decorating for Solstice (the house was already decorated with Christmas and Hanukkah stuff).

We mostly just reused the lyrics and chords from the Secular Solstice github; Josh made a few changes here and there to his versions of the songs but it was enormously valuable to have everything cataloged and organized on this site. I maybe could have cobbled it together from other sites and resources, but having it all in one place was so useful.

Outside?

I was originally planning to take participants up to the roof and look at the stars and sing for 15 minutes, but at the final rehearsal I realized it was going to add a lot of time, disrupt the emotional part of the event, and risked people being too cold (especially Josh’s guitar fingers!), so made the call to stay inside. I think that was the right choice.

It would be interesting to try an all-outside ceremony but it’s a bit hard to figure out how that would work.

Retrospective

Went well

  • Music feedback from Josh was on point, specifically suggestions of Sound of Silence and Hard Times Come Again No More, but also his work on figuring out the right chords for a lot of songs he didn’t know.
  • Abi and Josh did a slightly-more-rhythmic version of Next Right Thing that went well and was easier to sing along with than the Disney version, but used more of the original chording than Jeff Kaufman’s version.
  • It was great to have dinner-making event happening before and dinner after; it made it more worth a trip for people who were attending both, and then afterwards there was food and hangouts.
  • Held at home, not a venue, for added coziness
  • Tons of songs available to choose from on github
  • 20ish attendees was a good number, we could probably go up to 40 and still have it be cozy
  • 500 Million speech was very emotional for me in a positive way
  • Sound of Silence and Hard Times Come Again No More were great singalong songs
  • I made a YouTube playlist and sent the songs to the attendees ahead of time. A few people commented that they used it to learn the songs, so I think this was a good idea.
  • Got lots of participation for all songs
  • Good reviews from participants
  • Printed program was good

Not so well

  • Some of the songs are hard to sing for new people:
    • Brighter Than Today has too much variance between choruses
    • Hymn to Breaking Strain has a difficult melody
    • Time Wrote the Rocks has weird timings - especially Glen Raphael’s version which was the one I was starting from
  • The pre-written chords weren’t as good as they could be for several songs - Josh, our music lead, spent some time to figure out new chords for Next Right Thing and Hymn To Breaking Strain.
  • Emotional arc felt a bit rushed
  • I mis-explained “teaching the chorus” for Bitter Wind Blown
  • Slides didn’t always advance correctly and I didn’t have a lyrics book myself

Next time

  • Again hold it at Workshop House or another home like it
  • Again co-organize a holiday dinner of some sort to happen afterwards, and probably solicit potluck contributions
  • Again send the YouTube ahead of time
  • Invest in music planning a bit more - do a better job with chord planning for singalong purposes, especially Brighter Than Today
  • Get a box of little taper candles, and have a moment where neighbors light each other’s candles hand to hand
  • Probably again do a printed handout and a slide deck since it wasn’t too hard to do both and I think they each have unique value.
  • Solicit a volunteer for slide deck advancement and bring them to the rehearsal
  • Song suggestions (evaluate for inclusion):
    • Long December- Counting Crows
    • World So Full - John Dee Graham
    • Ring Out Solstice Bells - Jethro Tull
  • Consider adding one or two songs or speeches, if there’s good stuff that we want to fit in