By Melissa Moore

Each year, after the bright swirl of holidays, a quieter interval appears, an almost imperceptible pause between Christmas (whether one celebrates it or not) and New Year’s Day. In North America, this has become “holiday time,” a period shaped by travel, indulgence, or extra work for many. Yet beneath the surface of our commercial and cultural rhythms lies a deeper question worth asking:

How do we honor the transitional space at the end of the year, the death of one cycle, and the tender birth of another?

As a white woman of European descent, I have spent years wondering how to relate to this threshold in a way that is culturally honest and grounded. Having fully integrated into a Tibetan Worldview, and then steeping back and asking myself, but what of that is my ancestry?

Part of my contemplative and decolonizing work involves exploring the fragmented strands of my own Germanic/Franco lineage, not to romanticize Europe’s past in anyway, but to understand what ancestral practices I have ethically inherited, reinterpreted, or released. Over time, I’ve shaped my own blend of prescribed and creative and emergent rituals for the Winter Solstice and the liminal stretch leading into the New Year.

I first encountered the phrase “Between the Years” while living in Europe. Since then, I’ve come to appreciate that this pause is not simply a quaint cultural expression, but a deeply human phenomenon. Across centuries and continents, people have mythologized this strange and sacred gap in time.

European and Western Approaches to the Year's End Threshold

Anthropologically, nearly all cultures recognize liminal moments—dawn and dusk, equinoxes, adolescence, seasonal transitions—periods when time feels softened, unsettled, and more open to insight. The days between December 25 and January 1 form one of the most potent thresholds in the Western ritual calendar.

In German-speaking Europe, Zwischen den Jahren referred to a span of days that did not belong fully to one year or the next. Time was believed to stand still. Fate could be altered. Spirits wandered more freely. Divination deepened.

In ancient Rome, the Festival of Janus honored the god who looks both backward and forward, marking the cosmic hinge between years. In Greece, this period mirrored Hesiod’s idea of Krisis—a time of divine rebalancing.

Across traditions, this temporal gap functioned as a ritual antechamber, a period outside of ordinary chronology when communities released the burdens of the past before stepping into the structure of the new year.

Ancient Rituals for the Time Between Years

Across Germanic and Alpine regions, the Rauhnächte, the twelve nights after Christmas, are the quintessential “between the years” practices. Houses were cleansed with aromatic smoke: juniper, mugwort, frankincense, birch. These rituals were thought to clarify unseen energies and escort wandering spirits onward. Each night was believed to foreshadow the coming year, and people kept careful track of dreams, omens, animal behaviors, and weather shifts.

Work was minimized. Weaving and spinning were forbidden. Communities understood this threshold as a vulnerable time when the new year was being invisibly woven into being.

Other ancient cultures turned toward divination, prophecy, and intuitive listening. The veil between past, present, and future thinned; the conditioned order loosened. People experienced expanded consciousness and remembered capacities.

There were also traditions of licensed disorder. Medieval Europe’s Feast of Fools and Rome’s Saturnalia inverted social hierarchies; servants feasted, masters served, the world briefly turned upside down. Ritualized chaos gave society a way to renew itself.

And always, communities honored the return of the sun. Bonfires burned away misfortune. Candles invoked the light’s return. Fire rituals purified, energized, and symbolized the rebirth gestating in the winter darkness.

Contemporary Echoes

Many of these ancient practices still live within us, though often in disguised or secularized form:

• New Year’s resolutions as modern divination;
• house-cleaning as purification;
• candle-lighting as invocation;
• smoke rituals as space clearing;
• retreat time as a reclaiming of stillness.

And again, the most personal question re-emerges:

What do you do with the liminal space between the years?

For centuries, this period has been understood as a collective portal, marked by suspended time, ancestral presence, purification, dreamwork, divination, boundary-loosening, and the cosmic renewal of the sun’s return.

Between the Years: A Karuna Contemplative Practice

Resting in the Liminal: Befriending What Is Ending and What Has Not Yet Begun

Purpose:
To attune to the subtle liminality of the days between Christmas and New Year’s, a threshold where the old year loosens its shape and the new has not yet formed. In the Karuna language, this practice cultivates presence, spaciousness, and compassionate awareness as we sense the shifting textures of Basic Sanity in ourselves and the world.

Setting the Space

(Ideally practiced between December 26 and January 1.)

Gather:

• A candle (fire)
  
• A stone or natural object (earth)
  
• A bowl of water (water)
  
• Incense or simple breath awareness (wind)
  

These represent the five elemental expressions of Basic Sanity: stability, clarity, fluidity, warmth, and spaciousness.

Invitation:
Settle as if time itself has paused. Let this be a moment outside the ordinary calendar, where nothing is demanded and everything is allowed.

A 10-Minute Daily Practice

Light the candle. Acknowledge each element in your own words. Take your seat.

Earth — Stability

Feel the weight of your body supported by the ground.

Wind — Clarity

Sense the clean air entering your lungs, enlivening awareness.

Fire — Warmth

Notice the subtle glow in your chest, hands, or belly.

Water — Fluidity

Allow your awareness to soften, spread, and move without effort.

Space — Openness

Release striving. Let concerns fall away. Rest in the open field that holds all the elements.

Pause here.

Feel the faint tremble of the threshold. Nothing is determined. This is the womb of the coming year, the quiet field where new forms might arise.

Stay as long as the moment invites.
Afterward, journal gently—approaching whatever arises with curiosity rather than judgment. The new year is yours to enter with clarity, compassion, and presence.