Yuletide Thoughts

It's December 2nd, and holiday preparations here are already in full swing. I am happy to report that I've made two batches of mulled wine and my gift procurement is just about completed, which leaves a lot of wrapping, mailing and delivery in my future. We have many of what I like to refer to as Goddess-children, some too grown up to be "gifted" but still due a hand-written and heart-felt missive, and others in the under-21 "actually need stuff" category. Since we usually send presents to the siblings of these kids as well, that's a lot to remember and take care of in a timely fashion. What good is a gift if it doesn't make it to its destination in time to be waiting under the tree?

But for me, the central holiday of the "holiday season" is the Winter Solstice, when I tend to do ritual with like-minded friends or as a solitary; then my spouse and I, both with European roots, go on to celebrate on "Holy Night," the German Weihnachten, December 24th. So I thought it might be fun to share some information about the abundant Pagan DNA of the winter holidays!

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the North Pole tilts farthest away from the sun during Earth's annual journey around it on December 21st or 22nd, making that the shortest daytime in Europe and North America. The sun appears to stand still at a low point in the sky. Our Pagan European ancestors mostly believed that the sun traveled around the Earth, and to them it looked as though the sun was moving away from the Earth, and their rituals were about keeping the sun, and thus all of life, from leaving their world forever. They might have been wrong about which planet revolved around which other one, but the image they associated with this time of year, the wheel, is apt: and the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian terms for "wheel," hweol and jul, are the origins of the term "Yule." At Winter Solstice the wheel turns, Earth ends the half of its annual journey that brings shorter days and begins the half that brings longer ones.

In Northern European Yule rituals in pre-Christian times, Solstice dancers danced in a circle in the deosil, or sun-wise, direction, what we call clockwise. They used sword-blades or staves to form a six-pointed star, a sun shape, asking the sun to turn back, come closer. Another common custom, still observed in parts of Scandinavia, the Celtic and Baltic countries and Russia, was to build a huge bonfire, or a chain of bonfires stretching from one hilltop to another - meant to attract the sun by showing it its own likeness. When the days grew noticeably longer, around December 24th or 25th, people relaxed and began to look forward to another spring and summer. Decorating our homes with lights at Yuletide makes perfectly good Pagan sense.

When Christianity arrived in Europe, the Christian authorities found it impossible to suppress the traditional Winter Solstice celebrations across Europe and the Middle East, all about light and new life. The Egyptians honored Isis and her birthing of their Sun God Horus; the Germanic peoples caled the night of Dec. 24 modranikht or Mother Night, the night their Great Goddess gave birth to Her son, one of the many forms of the Green Man or Harvest God who becomes the Goddess's consort in the spring and dies at the time of harvest, to be reborn again each Yule. The Persians, and many converts to their beliefs throughout the Roman Empire, celebrated the birth of Mithras, their God of Light, on Dec. 25th, shouting "Sol Invictus!" (Unconquered Sun!) Romans celebrated the Saturnalia, the twelve-day festival of Saturn and Ops, exchanging gifts, visiting friends and family, dancing, feasting, & temporarily reversing social roles: masters served slaves, for example.

Some of these customs and dates sound familiar, and they should. Astronomers and historians are pretty sure that the historical Jesus was born in the spring of the year 6 of the Christian Era, when the planets we now call Mars, Jupiter and Saturn came close together and likely formed what we now call the Star of Bethlehem. But during the first few hundred years of Christianity, Christians celebrated Jesus's birthday according to their local beliefs: on January 1st, January 6th, March 29th, April 20th or 21st, May 20th, or September 29th. It wasn't until the fourth century of the Christian Era that Pope Julius I ended the discussion by simply declaring that Jesus's birthday was on Dec. 25th. The Catholic Church's objective in declaring December 25th the official birthday was to pre-empt and push aside all the Pagan holidays that clustered around the Winter Solstice.

A Pope could get away with changing Jesus's birthday by decree, but it turned out there was no getting away from the Pagan customs that saturate Yule. One of these was the display of evergreens, symbols of ever-returning life. The Celts performed a Winter Solstice ritual that was a staged combat or dance pitting the Holly King, symbolic Lord of Winter and shorter days, against an Ivy King or Queen. Evergreen ivy often grows on oak trees, ancient symbols of summer. The eventual victory of the Ivy in the combat or dance heralded that longer days and warmer seasons on their way.

For many centuries evergreen trees (pine or fir) were brought into Northern European homes and temples at Yule, lit with candles, topped with a sun symbol, and decorated with ornaments made of straw, nuts and other foods to ask for a good harvest next year. The Yule Tree never went out of fashion with the Germans and Scandinavians, who still call it the Weihnachtsbaum or "Holy Night Tree." It came back to the British Isles in the Victorian Era (mid-1800s) and quickly spread to North America. The preference for a tree is rooted (bad pun) in the common Western cultural concept of a "World Tree" or "Tree of Life." The Christians renamed the Yule or Holy Night Tree, calling it the "Christmas Tree," and the sun at the top became a "Star of Bethlehem."

Wreaths also date from Pagan times and symbolize the constantly repeating wheel of the year, the unbroken circle of life. They are traditionally made of evergreens and often include bay laurel, sacred to the Greco-Roman sun god Apollo. Fruit and nuts decorated the wreaths; in wealthy homes, these were sometimes gilded, to invoke the sun and prosperity.

One Pagan decoration with a long history in Northern Europe and especially the British Isles had to wait eons before the Christian authorities let it reappear in homes and finally even in some churches. Mistletoe, the sacred plant of the Celtic Druids, grew on the equally sacred oak trees. It was held to be particularly holy because it bloomed sun-yellow very late in the year, and stayed covered in abundant berries when fruit was sparse. Druid priests cut it ritually with golden sickles, letting it fall from the trees to be caught by the people, not with their hands but in the folds of their clothing. The Druids then blessed the mistletoe and it was hung over the entrances of people's homes to ward off evil. Anyone who entered a house and passed under the mistletoe was greeted with a kiss of friendship: that's where our "kissing under the mistletoe" comes from.

The Yule Log tradition is linked to the Solstice fires. In Scandinavia and Britain, until quite recent times, the Yule Log was a sturdy tree trunk that had fallen without being cut down, for to cut a tree down would anger the fairies. The log was supposed to be big enough to burn throughout Yule, which in Britain meant for thirteen days. Yes, the good old Pagan 13: there are 13 moons (or menstrual periods) in a year! If you count them up, the so-called "Twelve Days of Christmas" are really twelve Holy Nights dividing 13 days, December 25th to January 6th. You can even make it fourteen days by adding the Germanic Holy Night on December 24th! A small piece of the previous year's Yule Log was always preserved and used to light the current one, a symbol of continuity. One survival of the Yule Log are the log-shaped cakes or Buches de Noel still baked or bought by many households for the holidays.

You may well have heard in old carols or elsewhere about the Boar's Head; there's a British holiday custom of ceremonially serving one at Yule or Christmas. This is an ongoing tribute to Freya, Scandinavian Goddess of love and war, to whom pigs are sacred. It's rooted in the fact that a large part of Britain was invaded and settled by Scandinavians during the first millennium of the Christian era. Christmas pudding, another British custom, known in the U.S. largely because of the novels of Charles Dickens, is another definite solar symbol: decorated with holly, round, made with fruit and nuts, and set afire before it is eaten!

An omnipresent symbol of the winter holidays in our times is Santa Claus. His name is a corruption of Saint Nicholas, who was a long-ago Christian bishop in what is now Turkey. Santa has little to do with Saint Nicholas, but he's more than just a commercial figure trying to get us to spend too much. He continues the gift-giving tradition of the Saturnalia, and his colors, interestingly, are the white, red and black of the Triple Goddess.

The European Santa Claus sometimes still wears a bishop's mitre and vestments and carries a bishop's staff. But he's accompanied by a strange dark figure, whom the Germans call Knecht Ruprecht, the servant Ruprecht. This "servant" actually represents the elves and fairies the old Pagans across Europe thought abounded at Yuletide; he also stands for the Dark or Green Man, the symbol of the Earth's eternal fertility. He's the one who's said to deal out punishments to the children who've been bad in the past year: lumps of coal and switches. But he also hands out gifts for his "master."

This idea of rewards and punishments being handed out at Yuletide is of ancient lineage. Before Christianity arrived in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, the Scandinavians believed that Odin, chief God of the Norse pantheon, rode out among humans at Yule for that purpose. Odin rode Sleipnir or "Never Sleeps," a horse with eight legs. Interestingly, our Santa Claus rides in a sleigh drawn by eight reindeer. The number 8 may well refer back to Sleipnir, while the reindeer is a symbol of the Hornèd God, one of the earliest shapes given to male deities in Europe.

So the familiar image of Santa in his sleigh refers to elves, to Odin, and to the Hornèd God! No wonder some US fundamentalist Christians claim that Santa is an anagram of Satan! All kidding aside, there's no devil, but quite a bit of the old Pagan Yuletide spirit in Santa Claus.

For example, did you ever wonder where we get the Christmas custom of hanging stockings over our fireplaces for Santa to fill with gifts after he climbs down our chimneys? Yep, it's Pagan. It links Santa to the solar Yule-fire which ought to be burning on Yuletide hearths and associates him, like the Hornèd God, with fertility. Filling empty stockings with gifts is a crop fertility charm, like a ripe grain-ear replacing the hollow straw left on the threshing-floor after harvest.

But even though I've gotten reasonably fond of Santa, I resent his complete take-over of Yule in the US. He's popular in Europe, too, but there his work is done by December 6th. Children carefully leaves pair of shoes outside their bedroom doors on the night of December 5th, filled with hay for Saint Nick's horse, and on the morning of the 6th they find the shoes filled with nuts and oranges and little gifts: a ritual very similar to our Christmas stockings. After that, the European Saint Nicholas's work is done. The gift-givers and Yuletide spirits who rule most of the holiday season in Europe were, and are, female.

In Sweden there's Lucia. Early in the morning on Dec. 13th, which the Swedes call "Little Yule," the oldest daughter in each house puts on a white robe and a crown of whortleberry branches and lit candles. She goes from bedroom to bedroom, waking her parents and her sisters and brothers and bringing them coffee and delicious round saffron-flavored cakes known as Lussekatter, or Lucia cats. During the day there are Lucia parades, with Lucia maidens and Star Boys, young men wearing white robes and tall "wizard" hats, the symbols of wisdom, decorated with golden stars or suns. Lucia means "light." Though the day supposedly celebrates a gorily martyred Christian saint, it's easy to read between the lines. Lucia Day is another Solstice ritual, and the Lussekatter, those round sun-colored cakes, point once again to Freya, the bright Goddess, who drove about in a chariot drawn by cats.

In Germany, the big Christmas gifts, as opposed to the small tokens left by Saint Nicholas, come courtesy of a small female angel who rides a tiny deer (another invocation of the reindeer spirit). She's called Christkindl, the Christ Child, but she's definitely not the Baby Jesus. In German homes, the tree is set up and decorated on December 24th in a locked living room, and the children are not allowed to see it until after dark. It's believed that it's the Christkindl who leaves the children's gifts and rings her silver bell, the signal that they may finally come in and see the tree! When they do, a window is open a crack: the Christkindl has just flown away on her magic deer, sometimes leaving a lock of angel-hair in the window-latch as "proof."

The Christkindl has ancient roots. Before Christianity, the one who traveled from one German home to another at Yule was Berchta, the Crone Goddess of weaving and spinning. Berchta took the souls of all children who died young into her care. She made her Yuletide rounds accompanied by a throng of child ghosts and a host of elves and fairies. She expected to find pancakes set out to feed her and her followers, just like Santa expects milk and cookies! Berchta could be harsh, punishing laziness and stinginess with plagues and destruction: but she was also very generous in rewarding hard work and kindness. Long before Saint Nicholas, she left gifts not in everyday shoes but in slipper-shaped cakes that had been baked specially in the hope that she would fill them. Someone very good at spinning and weaving might even find her spindle turned into solid gold. Gold? Spinning? We're back to the sun and its dance around the earth!

In Russia it's Kolyada, an elf-maiden in a sleigh, who brings the Yuletide gifts. And Italy has stuck to the ancient image of the female gift-giver too. Befana, an old woman always shown with a broom & dressed in many of the traditional accouterments of a witch, throws her presents down the chimneys (a recurring theme!) of Italian homes the night before January 6th. The Catholic Church explains her presence by saying that the Three Kings or Wise Men stopped at her door on their way to see the Christ Child but she refused to go with them when they invited her to come along, saying she had to finish sweeping the floor first. Befana's gift-giving is supposedly tied to her trying to catch up to the Wise Men and see the baby Jesus: she gives gifts to all children in the hope that she'll somehow leave one at Jesus's house. But she's closely related to Berchta, and explicitly witch-like, flying through the air on a broomstick to distribute her bounty.

Our New Year's Eve falls right in the middle of the Anglo-Saxon "Twelve" (really Thirteen) Days of Yuletide, now subsumed in Christmas. In much of Europe, pigs on New Year's Eve were and are thought to bring good luck, and no wonder, since they're sacred to many Goddesses: Norse Freya, of course, and Celtic Cerridwen and Greek Demeter, just to name a few. Another customary bringer of good fortune is the chimney sweep. He, or in some cases she, is the most recent incarnation of Yuletide deity: associated with the chimney, that is, the solar fire, and also disguised in the black uniform complete with top hat (another version of the high hat of wisdom) and a layer of soot. Disguises have been part of Yuletide from its ancient beginnings, as in the ritual dance of the Holly and Ivy and the role-playing and role-exchange of the Roman Saturnalia.

In ancient Britain, Wales and Scotland, the mummers or mimers performed and still perform at this time of year, as well as during Carnival, at May Day and at harvest time. They often dance a traditional Morris Dance: "Morris" is a corruption of the word "Moorish," a term medieval England used for all things non-Christian. One figure common at Yuletide is the Hoden or Hobby Horse. The word "Hoden" probably derives from the name Woden or Odin, taking us back to the chief god of the Scandinavians and Germans, and the Hoden or Hobby Horse harks back to the solar, eight-legged, sleepless steed sacred to Odin. "Hoden" is also German for testicles; the hobby horse is a fertility charm. In the depths of winter, the ritual chasing of young women and men by the Hobby Horse to mark them with tar or soot, the black color of earth and fertility, is often part of mumming.

Yuletide mumming isn't confined to British Isles. Disguises made of greenery, rags and fur, and elaborate masks, surface throughout Europe. Mumming and "guising," or disguising, and other evocations of the Green Man/Hornèd God, begin at Yuletide and erupt again at Carnival in February.

The US has its own versions of the mumming tradition. In Philadelphia, New Year's Eve brings the Mummers' Parade, a typically American combination of British and German traditions. A German-heritage Mummer moved to Mobile, Alabama in the early 1800s and started the celebration of Carnival or "Mardi Gras" there. It quickly spread to other southern cities: the most famous Mardi Gras is of course that celebrated in New Orleans, a flamboyant blend of French, African, English, Caribbean and German elements.

Fireworks just after midnight, at the very beginning of New Year's Day, are a common modern substitute for the Yule bonfire in much of central Europe; it's a custom now catching on in the US as well. And in Scandinavia, and the US in Minnesota and other states with lots of inhabitants of Scandinavian descent, burning the Yule or Christmas trees on the "last day of Christmas," January 6th, is their substitute for the old Yule Log or Yule bonfire.

Hope you've had fun discovering the origins of many of our "Christmas" customs! I wish you Good Yule!