"I could never understand why some friends of mine looked so hard for true & authentic & meaningful rituals out among the stones ... Go to Midnight Mass ... there's a collective celebration of light in the darkness, and lots of people to celebrate it with."

Sure, and for those of us who are so inclined, I think that plenty of us can and do appreciate a multiplicity of expressions of the sacred and communial experiences of the same.

I think that members of neo-Pagan religions, (and others amongst us who may not be memebers of any organised religion Pagan, Christian or otherwise) may find something in an Earth-based and specifically *seasonally* located form of communial sharing, which is arguably lacking in a seemingly politically assigned date.

I suspect that what may be found in an Earth and seasonally based ceremony, is an anchoring in a sense of the immanently sacred (for Wiccans specifically, matter or the Earth itself is cast as the feminine aspect of divinity ie. 'The Lady', in Gnosticism likewise, the Earth is similarly cast as the 'Anima Mundi' or Sophia) or numinous, as contrasted to the transcendent Heaven dwelling God of Christianity, and this answers the desire in the individual who so seeks (in the way you descibe) for a very particular type of experience which is evidently not being answered *for them*, by something like the Christian Mass.

Overall though, I think the poster below, who referred to 'fucking to keep warm' was in retrospect not simply trolling, but actually making a mischevously veiled but valid point. And I guess it's really all just about personal preferences: finding whatever it is in life that turns you on, and answers to your personal desire. Some people would wonder why others would want handcuffs and whips, when the Missionary position apparently serves most people quite well.

I'm not so much offering an answer to your question, because that wouldn't be possible. But what personally interests me, is not *why* doesn't Midnight Mass satisfy, (when it theoretically should but evidently doesn't), but from where does the impulse to manifest fresh/reinvent old (and apparently superfluous?) expressions of the sacred (which seemingly *do* for many), arise from?

Just thorticals, and probably as nonsensical as they usually are! ;-)