In a few days, on Twelfth Night, our Christmas decorations will be coming down. Anything which gets forgotten has to stay up until next year as it is believed to be unlucky to remove Christmas decorations after Twelfth Night.
But there’s an exception. Our lights. Which are Winter Lights, rather than Christmas Lights.
How come?

Almost all major religions have a winter light festival, mostly around the Winter Solstice (in the Northern Hemisphere) to celebrate the turn of the year and to provide light and hope in the darkness of winter.

• In Hinduism the most important light celebration is Diwali – the victory of light over darkness – which is slightly earlier than the solstice as it normally occurs around early November. Jainism also keeps Diwali.
• Buddhism, at least in Burma, has Tazaungmon which mostly falls in November-December.
• Chinese New Year seems to fit I here, as it too is a light festival celebrated on the first new moon between 20 January and 21 February.
• Islam, at least as practised in Iran, has both Jashne Sade, a mid-winter feast to honour fire and to defeat the forces of darkness, frost and cold, and Shabe Chelle, the turning point, the end of the longest night of the year and the beginning of growing of the days.
• Judaism, of course, has Hanukkah.
• The Roman feast of Saturnalia, with its reputation for debauchery, lasted a week and also fell around the Winter Solstice.
• Paganism, in its various forms – either ancient Paganism or its more modern incarnation as Wicca – celebrate the Winter Solstice as Yule.
• And of course Christianity has Christmas, which it cobbled together from Pagan Yule and Roman Saturnalia with Christian iconography as pargeting.
• And let’s not forget St Lucia’s Day on 13 December, a light festival widely celebrated across Scandinavia and some other countries.

I’m sure there are more, but you get the point.
There are many different traditions embedded in these festivals. In fact so many that years ago we decided to create our own. Hence our Winter Lights. So when the Christmas decorations – tree, holly, cards, crib figures and so on – come down the lights remain, just as they preceded the Christmas decorations.
In fact the tradition we created was to put lights in our main windows. They go up on the Feast of Christ the King, which is the Sunday before Advent (so in late November) and stay up until Candlemas on 2 February.
Why? Well, why not? Lights cheer the place up! They add some fun, interest and maybe even some mystery. They give light to scare away the dark during the gloomiest two months of the year. And while the lights don’t banish SAD they do shine a little happiness, and let’s be honest we could all do with that at this time of year.
Yes, OK, before anyone says it, the lights do take a certain amount of energy to run. But if, like us, you standardise on LEDs then the cost and environmental impact is negligible. As an example, the set of lights plugged in by my desk are rated to use 3.6 watts of electricity; over 70 days that’s 6KwHr at a cost of about £1. So you could run four sets for the cost of a couple of coffees, or (in London) the cost of a pint of decent beer. Even my environmentally conscious brain isn’t going to worry too hard about that; maybe I’ll just drink one fewer mug of tea a week.
So if you would like to help cheer the place up, and you have lights that you could like to leave up for a while, why not join our tradition. Together we might even be able to make it into something big.