Yule

The winter holidays can be as garish as the flashing multicolor of strings of lights or as stately as lit tapers marching along a kinara or a chanukkiah. Shopping centers from the mall to downtown streets are hubs of piped-in carols, shoppers juggling bags, and sidewalk Santas clanging bells. Social calendars fill as celebrants work in office parties, school pageants, shopping, baking, and packing for the long trip home. Media does its part to enflame our senses, with non-stop airings of holiday movies and specials on tv and radio stations devoted entirely to the sounds of the season. There are cards to write, presents to wrap, cookies to serve, stockings to stuff. And while all of this is rewarding for those who choose to celebrate, it is ironic that these celebrations arrange themselves around perhaps the most contemplative of all ancient holidays: Yule.

To ancient peoples, a yule was a wheel, and that is how many peoples conceived of the passage of time: as an ever-spinning wheel. The yule, or wheel of the year, had eight spokes, and each of those spokes represented the culmination of roughly six weeks’ time in the turning of the wheel. Because it was a culmination in the spinning of time, each spoke became associated with a holiday. But the spinning never ceased, and if each spoke in the yule represented an arrival, it was also a departure towards the next spoke on the wheel. The holidays, known as sabbats, were pauses, moments when daily activity was suspended to recognize, with celebrations both joyous and somber, the arrival and departure of each point of the turning of the yule, and of the neverending spin itself.

The sabbats spin through the seasons in recognition of the high points of each season as well as the mid-points between them. Yule and its compliment, Midsummer, arrive on the winter and summer solstices respectively. Celebrations of the sabbats proceed in ever-widening circles from the season being celebrated. Each sabbat contains not just the manifestation of itself but the reflection of its counterpart. On Midsummer, we celebrate long days of sunlight and the fullness of activity. On Yule, we celebrate long nights of moonlight and the fullness of rest.

How magical, how mystical is a winter night. Cold air is as crystalline as the ice glistening in the moonlight. Snow and ice are winter’s answer to summer rain, and the pools we swim in during Midsummer are the sheets of ice we brave if they're safe enough at Yule. After the harvest of Lammas and the fallow period of Samhain, many plants die off during winter, but many are simply resting, deeply and profoundly. And many others are vibrantly alive, from sentinel evergreen to spiky holly, from the brachts of poinsettias to the blooms of Christmas cactus, from the downy silver of mistletoe leaves to its snowy white berries.  The cold, elegant combination of green and white are the colors of yule, accented with the red of berries and bracts and the silver shine of ice.

We enter the clearing with a sense of wonder. The night sky is like black velvet set with diamonds, and in the grove, the trees seem to stand taller in the crystal shine of starlight. Our ancient ancestors identified a sole evergreen to represent the spirit of the season, and adorned those branches, so determined to stay green during this season that is as trying as it is beautiful, with veneration. This living tree represented the spirit of the forest, as it was venerated on this longest, coldest night of the year. The spirit of the forest is the spirit of the hunt, in recognition of those animals who give of themselves so that we may sustain. To all of nature, we are one, and animals and plants understand that with a knowing that is less to be articulated than simply to be lived. There is sacrifice, but it is the give and take of mutuality. Just as they provide for us, so do they deserve our stewardship.  

Whatever winter holidays we celebrate, the core of winter celebration is Yule. Not just evergreens but the yule log, blessings over candles, acts of kindness from charity to exchanging gifts, the shepherds at the manger and the camels of the Magi, feasting and song, even Santa Claus himself all track back to the holy night of Yule. If in our modernity we experience the winter holidays as times of bustle, it is good to remember that the journey from altar to pew begins in the sacred stillness of the winter forest. In those ancient clearings, ancient memories evoke profound truths, but the spirits of the forest, ever watchful, only communicate with humans when our cacophony is stilled. If we enter that cold, starlit clearing with reverence, we cannot help but receive the gifts of a long winter night. Secret knowledge travels on the freshets of crystalline air but, as stags scenting hunters, we must attune.