Experiencing Winter Solstice in magical imagination

I regard the Winter Solstice as a phase of the year lasting about a week, rather than today specifically.

Because day length barely changes for several days - even up here in an extreme latitude (55 degrees north), on either side of an astronomical solstice. 

The solstices have the slowest rate of day-to-day change in day-length of any time of year, just as the equinoxes have the fastest. 

Such an insight means that one can (more often) legitimately mark and celebrate the solstice at a time when the skies are clear, and in places where ravening hordes of noisy and crusty neo-pagans are absent!

Or, even better - at least for me, and people like me - is to create the event in active imagination, from memories and previous imaginings.  

Such was what the great Christian occultist Gareth Knight recommended: that when we visit enchanted or sacred sites, we are only seldom in an exalted mood (we may be ill, frazzled, distracted), and the situation may not be conducive to a here-and-now spiritual experience (adverse weather, intrusive crowds). 

But we should be attentive, observant, give the place a chance to soak-into us...

And then use these memories - and other memories of a personal, literary, artistic, imagined etc. nature - to re-create and synthesize an ideal experience; at some time later - in meditation. 

In other words, we can follow the advice of William Wordsworth in that classic statement of Romanticism: the preface to Lyrical Ballads: 

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

We need, therefore, to put aside notions that meditative re-creative imagination is a second-hand or second-rate experience...

And realize that this is the definitive mode of enchantment, or participation, for people like us, here and now.