I'm glad that someone else started this thread, because it gives me an opportunity to let people know about my own rather peculiar answers to the question, "What else can we sing at this time of the year?"

Last year, I posted recordings of three (northern hemisphere) winter solstice songs to SoundCloud. The playlist includes these songs:

• "The Shepherd's Boon", about some rural shepherds' seasonal bonus circa 1000 AD


• "Long Is the Winter Till the Sun's Return", which is a very secular, natural-history-based, count-backwards-from-twelve song


• "The Year That 'Old Christmas' Was New", about how Gregorian calendar reform finally was implemented in the UK

Songsheets (lead sheets with music and lyrics) for those three songs and about half a dozen more that I consider suitable for the solstice can be found on my web site, in the section called The cycle of the seasons.

Howard Kaplan
Songwriter and occasional performer
Toronto, Ontario, Canada