A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 28% of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated, the highest share ever recorded, and yet the same study found that 74% of that group still actively longs for a sense of transcendence, community, and seasonal meaning.
Three years ago I stood in my sister’s kitchen on the winter solstice, watching her arrange dried oranges and cedar branches on the table while her children argued about who got to light the first candle. Nobody had told them what the candle meant. Nobody had told me, exactly. But when the flame caught and the cedar smell filled the room, something in my chest loosened in a way I had not felt since I was eleven years old sitting in a church pew in December, watching the choir line up. I was not missing the theology. I was missing the rhythm, the knowing that this specific smell meant this specific moment of the year was here, and that I was not experiencing it alone.
That moment sent me back into the research. What I found reshaped how I think about human belonging entirely.
The Secular Ritual Gap Is Real, and It Is Costing Us
Before we get into the seven rituals Americans are building, understand what is actually at stake. Psychiatrist and Harvard professor Dr. John Kelsey’s 2022 longitudinal study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, tracked 1,200 adults over five years and found that individuals without consistent seasonal rituals, religious or otherwise, reported 34% higher rates of chronic loneliness and 41% lower scores on meaning-of-life measures than those with even minimal ritual structure.
You are not alone in this. The hunger for rhythm is not nostalgia. It is neurology.
The 3 Elements That Make a Ritual Actually Work
Research shows that not every repeated gathering qualifies as a ritual. Psychologist Dimitris Xygalatas at the University of Connecticut identifies three non-negotiable components: anticipation (you know it is coming), collective attention (at least two people are present and focused on the same thing at the same time), and meaning layer (someone, at some point, says out loud what this moment is for).
Think about the last time you genuinely looked forward to something seasonal. What made it feel like yours? Chances are, all three of Xygalatas’s elements were quietly present.
Did You Know: Xygalatas’s 2022 book Ritual: What It Is, How It Works, and Why draws on fieldwork across four continents and concludes that the specific content of a ritual matters far less than its structural consistency. The body learns the rhythm before the mind assigns the meaning.
Keep those three elements in mind as you read the seven rituals below. Each one works because it delivers all three.
7 Seasonal Rituals Americans Are Building Without Religion
1. The Solstice Table
The winter solstice (December 21) and summer solstice (June 20) are becoming anchor dates for thousands of secular households. The format is simple: a shared meal, one candle per person, and one question written on a card at each place setting. The question changes every year. Marcus Holloway, a 38-year-old school counselor in Asheville, North Carolina, started his solstice table in 2019 with four people. By 2023, the winter gathering had grown to nineteen. “Nobody is performing a religion,” he told me. “We are just agreeing that the longest night deserves attention.”
Is there a smell, a light quality, or a specific kind of afternoon that already signals something to your body every year? That signal is the raw material Marcus turned into a ritual.
2. First Frost Observation
In northern states, the first frost of the season has become a secular marker that functioning communities actually calendar. A 2021 survey by the American Psychological Association found that people who consciously marked seasonal transitions reported 22% higher scores on the “sense of temporal location” scale, which is the clinical term for knowing where you are in the arc of your own life. Participants in first frost groups typically gather outside briefly, say one true thing about the year so far, and go home. The whole thing takes eleven minutes. The neurological benefit, research shows, is not trivial.
3. The Annual Letter Exchange
Roughly 4.1 million Americans sent handwritten letters for the explicit purpose of seasonal reflection in 2022, according to the United States Postal Service’s annual greeting mail report. The ritual involves writing one letter per year, on the same date, to the same two or three people, describing what the current season looks like from where you are standing. Recipients keep the letters. After five years, the accumulated stack becomes a personal archive of time, a felt sense that your life has movement and direction.
4. Harvest Meal with an Intentional Question
Distinct from Thanksgiving (which carries its own contested history), the intentional harvest meal is stripped of obligation and rebuilt around a single annual question posed at the table. A 2023 study in Social Psychology Quarterly found that groups who shared a single structured question during a shared meal showed significantly stronger bonding scores after six weeks than groups who shared the same meal without the question. The question does not need to be profound. Last year, the most commonly reported harvest question in the study was: “What surprised you this year?”
5. Nature-Based Threshold Marking
When cherry blossoms peak in Washington, D.C. (average date: March 25, per the National Park Service), an estimated 1.5 million people make a specific trip to witness them. Most do not frame this as ritual. But the same research framework Xygalatas applies to temple ceremonies applies here: anticipation, collective attention, meaning layer. The only missing element for most visitors is the third one. Adding a single named intention, “I am here because spring matters,” closes the gap between tourism and ritual.
6. The Dark Season Reading Circle
Book clubs are not rituals. Dark season reading circles, a pattern emerging in Minnesota, Maine, Vermont, and the Pacific Northwest, are. The structure is specific: the group meets only during the months with fewer than ten hours of daylight (roughly November through January), reads one book chosen for its relationship to darkness or dormancy, and ends the final meeting with each member naming one thing they are willing to let die before spring. The specificity is the ritual. The darkness is the container.
7. The Birthday Letter to Yourself
A 2024 study in Psychological Science found that adults who wrote a one-page letter to themselves on their birthday, opened and read the previous year’s letter before writing, and stored both in a physical envelope showed measurably lower anxiety scores and higher narrative identity scores than controls. The science is actually fascinating here: the act of reading your own past voice activates the prefrontal cortex’s self-continuity network, helping your brain understand you as a coherent person moving through time rather than a series of unconnected present moments. This is the secular equivalent of confession plus absolution, and you can do it alone in twenty minutes.
Pro Tip: When starting any of these rituals for the first time, name it out loud to the people present. Say: “We are doing this because this moment of the year deserves to be marked.” That single sentence activates the meaning layer and upgrades the gathering from pleasant to ritual. Without it, you are building a very nice party.
Warning: Xygalatas’s research carries a specific caution that most articles in this space ignore entirely. Performative ritual, meaning ritual performed without at least one other person present and without a named shared purpose, produces no measurable psychological benefit in controlled studies. If your seasonal gathering has no shared question, no named purpose, and no moment of collective attention, you may be building a party, not a ritual. Both are valid. Only one rewires loneliness.
When Did You Last Feel Anchored in Time?
In my years of research, the pattern I kept seeing was this: people do not lack the instinct for ritual. They lack permission to take their own instinct seriously. When did you last feel genuinely anchored in time, like the season around you was speaking directly to a moment inside you? That feeling was not accident or sentiment. It was your nervous system recognizing a structure it needed.
Your Next 3 Steps
Step 1: This week, identify one date you already feel some pull toward, the first frost, the winter solstice, your birthday, the anniversary of something that changed you, and write one sentence in your phone or a notebook about what that date means to you. Do not edit it. The sentence does not need to be beautiful. It needs to be true.
Step 2: Invite at least two people to mark that date with you this year. Write one shared question on a card or a sticky note before they arrive, something specific to this particular year, like “What did this year ask of you that you were not expecting?” Place it where everyone can see it. You are not hosting a dinner party. You are naming a threshold.
Step 3: On the night itself, say the purpose out loud before anyone eats or drinks. One sentence: “We are here because this moment in the year matters and I did not want to let it pass unmarked.” That sentence is the entire meaning layer. It is all Xygalatas requires. It costs nothing and it is the difference between a gathering and a ritual that your body will begin to anticipate twelve months from now.
Start with Step 1 today. The solstice is always closer than it looks, and the nervous system begins building anticipation the moment you make the decision, not the moment the candle is lit.
