Blog · November 2, 2026 · 6 min read

Winter Solstice Activities for Kids: Simple Ideas

The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, and in 2026 it lands on Monday, December 21, at 3:50 p.m. Eastern time ¹. The simplest way to celebrate it with kids is to lean into the dark instead of fighting it: eat dinner by candlelight, carry a homemade lantern around the block, and watch the early sunset together. Then mark the turn with one small thing you repeat every year, because the days start getting longer right after ².

What the solstice is, in words a kid can follow

Earth is tilted on its axis by about 23.5 degrees as it travels around the sun ³. On the December solstice, the Northern Hemisphere is leaning away from the sun as far as it ever does, so we get the shortest day of the year, and after that the trend reverses and the light comes back ². Put another way for a five-year-old: today the sun is being lazy, and tomorrow it starts waking up a little earlier.

If your child likes to see things, do the flashlight demo. Stick a piece of tape on an orange to mark where you live, tilt the orange, and carry it in a slow circle around a flashlight on the table. Let your child spot the moment when the tape barely passes through the light. That’s the solstice, and it’s a lot easier to understand with sticky fingers than with a diagram.

It helps to say what the solstice is not. It isn’t a scary night, it isn’t a holiday you have to buy anything for, and it doesn’t belong to one country or one faith. It’s a thing the sky does, and people all over the world have built warm, bright celebrations around it.

Things to do on the longest night

Pick two or three, not ten. The whole charm of a solstice evening is that it’s slow, and a packed schedule ruins it.

• Eat dinner by candlelight. Battery tea lights work fine with toddlers, and they can be handed out one per person.
• Make jar lanterns. Glue tissue paper squares to the outside of a clean jar, drop in a tea light, and add a wire handle. Carry them on a short walk after dark.
• Do a sunset countdown. Look up your local sunset time, set a timer, and go outside two minutes before to watch the light go.
• Turn off every light in the house for ten minutes, then let each child switch one back on and say one good thing about the year.
• Build a blanket fort and read by flashlight. Stories about winter animals go over well.
• Try shadow puppets on a blank wall. A rabbit, a dog, and a bird will carry a solid twenty minutes.
• Have a sun breakfast the next morning. Pancakes with a fruit face, orange juice, scrambled eggs, anything round and yellow.
• Bring a plant or branch indoors, set it in water, and watch it over the next few weeks.

Turn it into a week of sun watching

This is the part older kids actually remember, and it costs nothing. Starting about a week before December 21, write down the sunrise and sunset times each day on a sheet taped to the fridge. Keep going for a week after. Your child will see the numbers stop shrinking and start to grow, which is far more convincing than being told.

At the same time, push a stick into the yard or stand a pencil in a lump of clay on a sunny windowsill. At noon each day, mark the tip of its shadow with a pebble or a dot of marker. Solstice shadows are the longest of the year because the sun sits so low. By February the dots will have pulled in noticeably, and you’ll have an outdoor chart nobody had to buy.

Younger kids can do the same idea with their own bodies. Have them stand in the same spot at the same time, trace their shadow with sidewalk chalk, and compare it to a tracing you make in June.

Quiet crafts for the afternoon

Afternoons go dark early in late December, so plan something at the kitchen table around four o’clock.

Paper sun medallions are easy: cut a circle, glue on triangle rays, and write one wish for the coming year on the back. Tissue paper suncatchers taped to a window catch the last of the light. You can also make a simple candle holder by wrapping a jar in yarn, or press a hand into air-dry clay and keep the print as a marker of how big your child was the year the sun turned.

If you’d rather hand over something ready to go, our winter coloring pages cover snowflakes, mittens, cocoa, and sledding, and the snowflake mandala keeps an older child busy for a while. Kids who love the frost-on-the-window part of winter sometimes enjoy a note from Jack Frost left on the sill overnight.

How families around the world mark the longest night

Reading about other traditions is one of the better solstice activities, because it shows kids that darkness has been met with food, light, and company for thousands of years. Here are a few you can look up together.

• Dongzhi, the winter solstice festival observed in China and other East Asian countries, falls around December 21 to 23 on the longest night, and families eat tangyuan, sweet glutinous rice balls ⁴.
• Shab-e Yalda in Iran marks the longest, darkest night of the year and was added to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists in December 2022 ⁵. Families gather at the home of the eldest relative to eat together ⁶.
• In Sweden, Lucia Day on December 13 is a festival of light in the middle of a dark winter, a custom about 400 years old ⁷.
• At Newgrange in Ireland, a passage tomb roughly 5,000 years old, the passage and chamber line up with the rising sun on mornings around the winter solstice ⁸.
• At Stonehenge in England, thousands of people gather at the stones for the solstice; around 5,000 came one recent year ⁹.
• Soyal is the winter solstice ceremony of the Hopi and Zuni peoples of the American Southwest, held on December 21 ¹⁰.

Make one small thing repeatable

A tradition only becomes a tradition on the third or fourth go. Choose one ritual that takes under fifteen minutes, and protect it.

Some that hold up well: the same candle lit at the same table, with each person naming something they’re glad happened; a photo taken in the same doorway every December 21, so you can line the years up side by side; a jar where everyone drops a slip of paper saying what they hope the returning light brings; or a family walk on the same route, in the dark, with the same thermos.

Write the answers down somewhere you’ll find them again. We keep ours on a year page in the Grow Book, one page per child per year, with the photo and a line of what they said. Reading last year’s answers out loud before you add this year’s is usually the best part of the night.

If your child doesn’t love the dark

Plenty of kids are uneasy about a dark house, and a solstice evening can tip over fast. Give your child the flashlight and let them be the one in charge of the light. Keep the lights-out stretch to a minute or two at first, and sit close.

Doing it outside often works better than inside, since the sky still holds some light at five o’clock. A short walk to the end of the street and back, with everyone carrying a lantern, is usually plenty. Go in, get warm, and end with something to eat.

And if the whole plan collapses at 5:30 because somebody is tired and hungry, that’s fine. The sun will do the same thing next December 21, and you’ll get another try.