Return to Information Return HomeThe word Yule is thought to come from the same Old English/Old Norse source as yodel and yell, which is what people used to do to call back the sun.
Yule is a time of joy, despite the howling blizzards and the pain of venturing outside. We string coloured lights in the face of darkness. We feast royally and exchange gifts, heedless of the frozen gardens and snowy fields. Foolhardiness or faith? In this modern world it's neither, but remember the past when cold and hunger threatened everyone. Once upon a time we were all street people without even a street.
We Pagans celebrate Yule on the solstice night, when the darkness is at its greatest but will thereafter give way – slowly, slowly, minute by minute and day by day – to the light. This is the night of the sun's rebirth.
Christians celebrate the once-and-only birth of the Son a couple of days later, when careful observation reveals that, indeed, the night is retreating and the light is growing. Pagan Romans celebrated the Saturnalia at the winter solstice, and Christianity adopted that time as a way of first assimilating the Roman feast and later the Northern Yule.
The secular world, needing proof, waits yet a few more days until January 1, to declare that, yes, the tide has turned and we can celebrate the New Year.
You will note that Wiccans actually celebrated their new year back on October 31 — November 1. This has to do with the old Celtic idea that as the day begins in darkness, so the new planting year begins in the barren winter. The Celts, like the Jews, marked their day from sunset to sunset. We in the modern world do that too – to some extent – counting our day from midnight to midnight. And we mark the beginning of the year at what could be called midnight on the wheel of the year. And, just as babies come forth after a time in darkness of the womb, so we think of Mother Earth as gestating the Sun God during the darkening time of autumn and birthing him at the solstice.
The long, cold winter still lies ahead. Before we hunker down for the long haul, we celebrate the abundance of the summer past and the summer yet to come. Originally it was a kind of magical act – think and act abundance in order to attract same, a mind-set not unfamiliar to us of the New Age. It was also a practical matter, storing up fat for the cold time. Farm animals got an extra ration on that day as well, to help carry them through. Today families and friends gather to warm themselves by the fireplace (or central heating), eat and drink and make merry. The children curl up in their beds and dream of Santa Claus, that Pagan spirit riding the storm, a godling of the chimneys, a jolly old elf, an Arctic sprite with phantom reindeer, who comes from the eternal barrens of the North Pole to bring them presents – and accept their offering of milk and cookies.
As ever, the tree is our symbol. At Yule, harking back to Germanic/Scandinavian customs, it is the evergreen – spruce, pine, fir, cedar. While all the other trees stand like skeletons in the snow, the evergreens display the on-going life that spans the cold abyss between summer and summer. And at this celebration we honour the life-giving quality of trees by burning the Yule log which, for modern Pagans, may be a piece of the previous spring's May pole. In the early days, when people first ventured out of the warmth of Africa, it was the trees of the European forests that offered shelter with their bodies and heat with the burning of their very substance.
The tree became a profound symbol in the temperate areas of the world. In the Middle East this was so engrained that it took monotheism a long, hard struggle to dissuade people from worshipping in their old sacred groves, and ultimately the founder of Christianity died on a cross, often referred to as a tree. But the tree still represented life in systems as separate in time and space as the Jewish Cabala and the Nordic Yggdrasil (both these systems cohabiting in modern Pagan practice.)
There was a time when cutting down a great tree took much effort and entailed great danger. Nevertheless the early Europeans pretty well managed to strip the landscape. It took them centuries to complete the task, whereas we moderns, with our impressive machinery, may finish off the rest of the world in a few decades. Modern people look on trees as something to "harvest" (even those they never planted) and turn into facial tissue and computer paper. We are so drunk on our power over nature, and our ability to feed our desires, that we have forgotten that trees are our elders (no pun intended), to be respected and honoured. And, in a purely practical approach, trees are life – they breathe for us, taking in our carbon dioxide and giving out oxygen.
How do present-day people celebrate this season? By chopping down evergreens by the millions to prop up in their living-rooms and decorate with baubles, only to discard them a week later. People might consider decorating a tree growing outside, or properly celebrate the artificiality of modern life (with all its benefits as well as problems) by means of a plastic tree.
The lessons of Yule are that we must share with each other, not just ourselves of the present but ourselves of the future. That, despite the problems we make for ourselves, we must laugh and have hope even when things are bleak. That the wheel turns again and again, and the buried seeds will eventually waken and sprout.
Have a great Yule/Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa. Celebrate the light!