I saw and liked this set of lyrics in an ad in The Nation magazine some years ago.  Yesterday, the eve of winter solstice, I tried to find it online so that our little group of family and friends could sing it together. It wasn’t indexed in the magazine’s online archives.  I also combed through a couple of dozen pages of Google hits on “solstice song” and “solstice hymn” and couldn’t find it.  There’s a lot of pagan, wiccan, and miscellaneous new ageish music for the solstice, but this song eluded me.  I finally found it embedded in a graphic file for a greeting card on the Freedom From Religion Foundation website.  I thought it would be a service to post the lyrics here as plain text so that it might show up on future Google searches.

Solstice Tribute

(To the tune of ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’)

O, shining star of solstice time,

Your radiant hours are few.

You turn and strike the New Year’s chime,

We owe our lives to you.

These darkest days of winter,

We miss your warming rays;

But every year this hemisphere

Returns to brighter days.

—

Since olden days the human race

Has feared your warmth would die.

The evergreen is ever seen

As hope we will survive.

O, ancient drums stop beating,

And superstitions fall!

It’s time for Reason’s Greetings,

For peace, goodwill to all.

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The FFRF website adds:  “The pleasing poem (above) penned by Dan Barker is available as a greeting card (one of the Foundation’s ten seasonal greeting cards available at ffrf.org/shop/solstice/). It is also recorded on the double musical CD, “Friendly Neighborhood Atheist,” featuring Dan Barker. More information on this and the music CD “Beware of Dogma,” is available at:
http://ffrf.org/shop/music ”

Don’t know the melody?  A piano score is at the Cantorium website.  An instrumental mp3 is on the Singing Bell website.

Oh, and about Bethlehem, here’s the Wikipedia article.