HumanLight

HumanLight is a midwinter celebration for humanists and other non-religious people, kept on 23 December. It was created in 2001 by the New Jersey Humanist Network (its founders are credited as Gary Brill and Joe Fox), and its inaugural gathering, attended by around a hundred people including the prominent humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz, was held that December in Verona, New Jersey. Its purpose is not to parody or replace a religious feast but to offer the gathering and warmth of the December season on humanist terms, giving secular people an occasion of their own in a month heavy with others' festivals.

Its stated themes are reason, compassion and hope, often represented by candles in those colours, and observance takes the form of a shared meal, music and readings with family and friends. It is deliberately light in structure, with no fixed liturgy and considerable local variation from one group or household to another, an openness in keeping with humanism's resistance to prescribed ritual. Since its founding it has spread to secular organisations and individuals across the United States and beyond. HumanLight is a clear example of a very recent, consciously constructed holiday, invented to meet a felt need for a positive secular celebration in the winter season rather than inherited from any older tradition.

HumanLight was conceived specifically to address what sociologists studying secular and religiously mixed families have called the December dilemma, the social and personal pressure nonreligious people and interfaith families can feel during a month when Christmas, Hanukkah and other religious observances dominate public and commercial life, leaving those without a religious tradition of their own, or navigating more than one, without an equivalent occasion of their own to mark with family and community.

Adoption of the holiday has remained modest and organic rather than centrally promoted: individual humanist chapters, secular student groups and interfaith families have taken it up at their own pace since 2001, with some communities holding organised public HumanLight gatherings modelled closely on the original New Jersey event and others marking it only as a private family occasion or not observing it at all, so that, unlike more centrally organised religious holidays, HumanLight's actual reach depends entirely on scattered, bottom-up adoption by individual groups and families who encounter and choose to keep it rather than on any coordinated promotional effort by a national organisation.