2025 marks another year of varied and changing cultures and customs in the Pacific Northwest.
As communities in Northwest Washington gather in the darkest time of year, light candles, sing carols, share treats and gifts and form resolutions for the new year, some practice more obscure variations. Covens congregate for the winter solstice. Folks prepare for the darkest day and the turning of seasons by walking through a labyrinth. Dutch descendants adapt a local tradition that is becoming less Dutch.
Pagans and the solstice
Saturday afternoon, Skagit Pagans assembled in Alger Community Hall off Old Highway 99 to celebrate the winter solstice. Some donned ceremonial corsets and gowns, but most wore festive clothing or what’s comfortable.
Pagans gathered in a circle, creating a “sacred space,” said Betsy Sauther, Wiccan high priestess and founder of both Whatcom and Skagit Pagans. The idea is to create a boundary to keep negative spirits away. Attendees orient themselves to the cardinal directions and focus on the basic elements — earth, wind, fire and water.
Then, they invite gods and goddesses by name into the space to watch over and give blessings — Roman goddess Diana, Near Eastern goddess Astarte, Greek goddesses Hecate and Aphrodite.
“It’s not like you’re saying, ‘you better get in here and do what I say’,” said Sauther. “That’s a different deal. It’s more like conjuration, and you’re in the old witchcraft and the old kind of occult stuff.”
Sometimes, the gods enter the body of the practitioner, she said.
“It’s not like you’re totally possessed. You feel their presence,” she said. “I have personal experience with it, and it does take practice sometimes for people. You feel like they’re there, and they want to share a message. It can be very emotional, and people around you can feel that if they are sensitive to it.”
This ceremony, called Turning the Wheel of the Year, asks time to continue to help move people through the darkest days. Wiccans light candles and sing and perform ritual to “raise energy.” This energy creates a cone from the circle, Sauther said, then “shoots off into whatever it’s going to do.”
“It’s kind of like a jacked-up prayer,” she said.
Then, the group shares cake and wine, a practice that predates Christian sacraments.
Sauther’s interest in the occult formed from a very young age. She read about a woman known as the White Witch of Wisconsin, who started an organization called Circle Sanctuary in 1974.
“I’m like, ‘oh sh*t, they’re real,’” she said.
Then, she fell deeper into her studies and sought teachers, eventually commuting to Vancouver, British Columbia, to meet with one.
“The best way to learn is to actually do ceremonies, participate in ceremonies, take a part in them,” she said. “Don’t just watch. We don’t watch; we do.”
Wicca, like the Freemasons, holds degrees of rank. When one reaches the third degree, they become a high priestess.
“I went through training with other people who had been very, very serious about their studies, and we had a coven and I have a coven now,” Sauther said.
She formed the Whatcom Pagans group in the ‘70s. When she moved to Bayview about 10 years ago, she formed the second group.
The winter solstice is important to celebrate because of the scope of the astronomical event, she said.
“What would happen if the light never came back? Earth would die,” she said. “If the light never became lower, we wouldn’t have our seasons. We’d have equator-like weather, which would also maybe cause deserts and barrenness eventually. We do want those cycles to happen. So, celebrating those changes throughout the year, big deal.”
It’s an important time of year to come together regardless of culture, she said.
“This is the time of year when we’re all feeling kind of depressed and needing to get together with people and have hope and fight depression,” she said.
Scholars believe early Christians fixed Jesus’ birth festival on a date that overlapped existing solstice-season feasts. Over time, Christian and older pagan customs blended in practice.
“The Christians strategically did take on a lot of the pagan agricultural and astronomical holidays because it was already being done,” Sauther said. “That’s just what anyone did when they were taking over a country.”
Local Dutch and Sinterklaas
In the Dutch tradition, the Sinterklaas feast is celebrated with gift-giving on Dec. 5. For the largely Dutch community in Lynden, recent years have gone without the Chamber-run Sinterklaas celebration.
Lore tells of Sinterklaas coming to town on a white horse, said Herm Laninga, who migrated from the Netherlands to Lynden in 1952. Alongside Sinterklaas was his assistant, Zwarte Piet or Black Peter. Piet carries a sack full of pepernoten, Laninga said — brown spice cookies the size of a quarter, and hands them out to good kids.
Pepernoten tastes like black licorice, said Gary Vis, executive director of the Lynden Chamber of Commerce, and “it’s hard as a freaking rock. It’s really not child-friendly, but they seem to like them, whatever.”
The naughty kids, Laninga said, would be put in a bag and hauled off to Spain.
“Spain was a longtime enemy of the Dutch because they tried to take over and control the Netherlands because it was rich in trade,” he said.
Sinterklaas dresses in a Catholic bishop’s miter, Laninga said, and a red robe over his shoulders and a fake beard.
“Maybe he grew a beard for the occasion. Who knows? As a kid, you don’t know those things,” he said.
According to Vis, Sinterklaas must be very tall.
“I’m 5-feet-10-inches, and (Sinterklaas’ robe) looks like a huge, oversized bathrobe on me,” he said. “It looks like I’m a toddler who put on dad’s coat.”
Often, the person who played Zwarte Piet would put on face paint to appear African.
“People in blackface, that kind of thing is not acceptable anymore, and rightfully so,” Laninga said. “But it was really pretty innocent stuff in the day. It was just the idea that, you know, (Sinterklaas) had an assistant. We didn’t think anything of it. I’d never seen a black person, an actual African person in my youth, in our little (Dutch) town.”
Vis said some communities who are moving away from Zwarte Piet due to criticisms of racism have altered the tradition to Regenboogpiet, or Rainbow Pete.
“Their version of the story is Zwarte sails his ship into the island and passes through a rainbow, and the magic of the rainbow, you know, empowers all the Zwartes,” he said.
Lynden opted for “Chimney Pete,” where the actors were smudged like they went through a chimney instead of having black skin. However, the Chamber stopped including this character in the early 2000s.
Lynden’s Peter didn’t vanish because of public criticism, Vis said, but because the local celebration through the decades has become decreasingly Dutch.
The public Dutch celebration in Lynden does not trace back to its early Dutch settlers. The ‘80s, when Lynden made a concerted effort to look more Dutch, is when Sinterklaas first came to Lynden on a white horse.
“We had two white horses die,” Vis said. “They didn’t die on us, thank goodness. That would have been awful. But it became a challenge to find a white horse. And then one of our Sinters was an older Dutch gentleman, and this guy had been doing it for years. And there was no way I was going to ever say, ‘dude, you can’t get on the horse anymore. You’re not stable up there. This is an accident waiting to happen.’”
For many years, Lynden resident Melissa VanLoo’s father played Sinterklaas.
“We tried different things, but really it kind of just came down to my dad got sick and died and we didn’t feel that we (could) fill the position again,” she said. “And now the museum does a Santa Claus thing.”
Many families still celebrate Sinterklaas in Lynden, but fewer people know about it now than they did in the ‘80s, she said.
“There was no major incident that happened. The interest in it kind of died down,” VanLoo said. “My family still celebrates. My kids still get pajamas and the chocolate letter and all that kind of thing. But Lynden has doubled in size since I was in high school, so with that comes other traditions.”
Community opinions are mixed, VanLoo said, but even generational Dutch families have opted to adapt the tradition to become more American.
“My grandmother who passed years ago used to tell me, we moved to this country,” Vis said. “We still ate the traditional Dutch foods. You boil oats in buttermilk. I don’t even know what it’s called, and I hate buttermilk, but they would all come over and eat. She still honored her heritage, but she just felt like, this is it. We don’t need to do this, so I had no qualms about it. It’s outlived. Ultimately it’s a marketing tool, and if it’s not bringing the people in that you would like to see, well, then you got to switch.”
Laninga said he always appreciated the celebration of Christ on Dec. 25 in addition to the Sinterklaas Celebration on Dec. 5.
For Vis, kids are what matters most.
“I’m OK with Santa Claus,” he said. “It’s all about the kids, man. It’s all about the kids. You want to make them smile. And if at the end of the day, we’ve made some smiles, mission accomplished.”
Labyrinth as reflection
According to Samantha DeSoer, a member of Project Labyrinth in charge of installing the labyrinth in Fairhaven Park in 2010, labyrinths have been used for thousands of years as a meditative practice and conflict resolution tool — especially around periods of reflection like the winter solstice and the new year.
“It is not a maze. It is not a puzzle to solve. You are trusting the path,” she said.
Unlike a maze, a labyrinth takes walkers on the same path in and the same path out. Labyrinths have been used across cultures, with origins tracing back to Ancient Greece and Egypt.
“There’s a very famous one in San Francisco at (Grace Cathedral), and then there was this reemergence of labyrinth in more holistic and public spaces,” DeSoer said. “Now you can see them in school playgrounds. You can find them in prisons. Many hospitals use them. Hospice centers; the cancer center in Bellingham had one for their patients.”
A labyrinth also sits on the lawn of the United Church of Ferndale.
Before the permanent Fairhaven installment, Project Labyrinth set temporary labyrinths with chalk to use during solstices and equinoxes, DeSoer said. Some people leave small tokens in the center, like a penny or a rock, symbolizing dropping a figurative weight.
“We chose the equinox and the solstice (and) New Year’s Eve so as you walk in the labyrinth, you can reflect,” she said. “And then as you walk out, you can have a sense of peace as well as clarity for what is to come.”
People can walk the path mindlessly or with intention, she said.
“I have used Labyrinths for, gosh, 20-plus years,” she said, “and sometimes I just use it to be quiet. Sometimes I go in as a contemplative space. I have something to let go of. I have something to chew on. I don’t think there’s any safer space in the whole world than the center of a labyrinth, even in the middle of Fairhaven Park, and there’s people playing and you hear the playground and you hear the cars and people biking on the trail, it all fades away when you’re in the center, and that is your space.”
People use the labyrinth in their own way and receive their own experience in doing so.
“I’ve seen people cry. I’ve seen people laugh. I’ve seen people do yoga. I’ve seen people just walk in and then walk right out. I mean, there’s no have-tos,” said DeSoer. “There’s no right way. It’s an experience. And whatever your experience is, walking in, pausing, if you wish, in the middle and walking back out, that’s your experience. And every time you walk a labyrinth, it will be different because you are different.”
The labyrinth in Fairhaven park is ADA accessible, open for all and used by all kinds.
“I’ve seen children with incredible trauma walk a labyrinth and have profound experiences and not have the words yet to explain what happened to them, but yet I see them walk in and sit in the center and walk out a completely different person,” DeSoer said. “No song, no dance, it’s just merely the act of walking, pausing, and then leaving. It really is something.”
— By Sam Fletcher
Also read in Salish Current:
• “Changing landscape of Western Washington’s ‘bible belt’,” Dec. 9, 2025
• “Chorale’s ‘Lest We Forget’ to recall the past, evoke hope,” Nov. 14, 2025
• “Celebrants mark 25 years of communing with fairies,” Aug. 25, 2025
• “Seeking festive cheer while struggling with financial fears,” Dec. 19, 2024
• “The season of (more!) waste,” Dec. 17, 2024