Back in high school, a non-pagan friend and I were discussing the winter holidays.
“But we have Solstice, too,” he contended, meaning non-pagans.
Well, in the sense that the Solstice happens whether or not you pay attention to it, I suppose that they do.
But here's my question. The Sun, the Earth: are these (so to speak) just people that you walk past in the street every day without really noticing, or are they People that you actually know and engage with?
As I write, we're nearing the end of the Samhain Thirtnight. Every morning—I'm awake then, I actually see it—the Sun rises a little later, a little farther South. Every day, he goes a little farther away, and we see that much less of him.
I don't know about you, and I don't know about non-pagans, but personally I feel that that fact somehow involves me.
That's what makes me a pagan. That's what makes Solstice—insofar as an astronomical event can be said to belong to anyone—ours in particular.
In the ongoing life (and relationship) of Earth and Sun, we're pagans because—somehow, for whatever reason—we feel personally implicated.
That's what makes us (as I tell well-meaning non-pagans when they wish me “Merry Christmas”) Solstice People instead.