The Midsummer Bonfires That Litha Borrows Its Imagery From

Long before the name Litha existed for any festival, Midsummer fire customs were kept openly across large parts of Christian Europe under other names entirely, most visibly Saint John's Eve on 23 June, tied to the feast of John the Baptist, when bonfires, all-night gatherings and herb-gathering were widespread in Scandinavia, the Baltic states, France, Spain and elsewhere, often blending pre-Christian solstice custom with an explicitly Christian saint's feast rather than surviving as a separate pagan observance running alongside it.

Scandinavian Midsummer in particular remains a major, widely kept public and family festival today, complete with maypole dancing despite the name's more usual association with May, bonfires and outdoor feasting, entirely independent of Wicca or the Wheel of the Year and considerably older as a continuously observed public custom than the 1974 coinage of Litha; modern Wiccans drawing on bonfires and herb-gathering for their own Litha observance are consequently drawing on this much wider and mostly Christian-era European midsummer custom rather than on any single ancient pagan festival that used the name Litha itself, since no such ancient festival by that name has ever been shown to exist.