This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Winter Months gathers the three months the Gregorian calendar's customary northern hemisphere convention places in winter, December, January and February. Each member's own season correspondence fact names that convention explicitly and also notes the same three months fall in summer south of the equator.
December holds the winter solstice, and around that turning gather the Saturnalia and the Unconquered Sun of ancient Rome, Yule and Christmas, Hanukkah in most years, Our Lady of Guadalupe on the twelfth and the Posadas novena before Christmas. Because the Gregorian civil year opens in January, traditions across the world stack rites of renewal onto that month: the Christian feasts of the Epiphany and Theophany, Japan's Shogatsu shrine visits, the Ethiopian Timkat, and the Hindu solar festival of Makar Sankranti all fall within its span. February carries a thread of purification through its own name, from the Roman februa, the instruments of ritual purification used in the month's rites, and through its observances: the Christian feast of Candlemas, the Gaelic Imbolc, and the pre Lenten preparations that often begin within it.
Read together the three months move from the solstice's turn of the light through a month whose many unrelated new year and renewal rites cluster around the civil calendar's own reset, to a February whose purification theme, named in its own Latin root, anticipates the fasting season several traditions open soon after.