The days and weeks leading up to the height of the winter holidays are both exciting and sacred to people from many different spiritual traditions. Christians have Advent, for example; Norse Pagans have Sunwait. Liturgical seasons leading up to a sacred day are far older than either of these traditions, and they have an important function: encouraging us to focus not just on the upcoming "special day" but on the way the year hinges around it.
And the Winter Solstice appears to have been the "central peg" on which the sacred calendar turned across much of early Eurasia, with the Sun Goddess as the driving force behind the year. Check out Patricia Monaghan's excellent book O Mother Sun! for some great research about this subject.
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