Christmas is one of our most traditional celebrations, and although it has an authentic religious meaning, the truth is that it also resembles some pagan rites or traditions that come from Germanic origins. We are talking specifically about Yule, a pagan holiday of which we now offer you all its details and when is celebrated.
The origin and history of Christmas is well known to all, but many other pagan festivals that are related to this time of year, or that have more to do with the winter solstice, are more unknown. One of the most surprising is that of Yule.
What is Yule and what is celebrated
Although Christmas, Hanukah and Kwanzaa are the holidays that are most celebrated in winter, the truth is that they are not the only ones. Yule is a mid-winter festival that revolves around thank the gods and goddesses for what you have, in addition to celebrating nature and its changes.
If however there are three main theories about Yul or Jól (pronunciation: “yoh-l”). The first one is like a celebration for the return of the sun. The second theory speaks of Yule as a winter party for the dead. The third theory describes Yule as a fertility festival, where people sacrificed animals to the gods, hoping to get a good harvest next year. Since Yule is about multiple parties and not just one, all three theories could, in theory, be true.
Yule, also known as Yuletide, also has many points in common with Christmas. That can probably be attributed to the fact that Yule is the archetype of the popular holiday. Yule is celebrated for twelve days, beginning with the winter solstice (December 21) which are also the same number of days that the Christmas holidays usually last. During the twelve days of Yule, crops are harvested to make a meal, trees are decorated with pine cones, foliage, and candles and gifts are exchanged with loved ones, again taking us back to the Christmas tradition.
In Scandinavia it is still traditional to leave food (usually porridge with butter) for the little tomte or nisse (house-elves) and thus there is a tradition of leave food (usually cookies) for Santa who is called Jul Tomte in Sweden (the Yule elf).
Somehow we can understand Yule or the winter solstice which is the shortest day of the year, like the celebration that pagans do at the same time as Christmas. In fact, Yule is the forerunner of Christmas, since when Christianity was spreading throughout Europe, many of the same symbols and traditions were assimilated into Christianity as a means of facilitating pagans recently converted to the faith.
When is Yule 2021
We already know that Yule is a pagan holiday that celebrates the winter solstice, so it starts with this one. For 2020, the celebration of Yule will start on Monday, December 21 and end on Friday, January 1, 2021.
Origin of yule
Like all passing moments, Yule is a period full of symbolic and magical valuesdominated by myths and symbols from a very distant past.
Christmas is the Christian version of the rebirth of the suntraditionally set on December 25 by Pope Julius I (337-352) with the dual purpose of celebrating Jesus Christ as the “Sun of Justice” and creating an alternative celebration to the most popular of pagan festivals: Yule.
Behind the solstice, with the longest night of the year on December 21, the days begin to lengthen again little by little. The date of December 25, before becoming famous as the “birthday of Jesus”, it was a day of celebration for peoples of very distant cultures and religions, in time and space. The origins of these ancient cults are found in what is the “beginning” of life on earth and what “from the beginning” has been the object of worship and veneration, that is, the sun.
In pre-Christian Celtic and Germanic traditions, Yule was the festival of the winter solstice.but when Christian missionaries began the conversion of the Germanic peoples, they adapted many local symbols and festivals. The Yule festival then turned into Christmas, maintaining some of its original traditions.
the cycle of nature
The “ancient” peoples were intimately linked to the cycle of nature, since his own survival depended on him. The man felt part of that nature, which had to appear in some “magical” way, but in a position of weakness. To do this, through ritual, he tried to “befriend” this or that force inherent in nature itself. At the center of this cycle was the sun that marked the rhythm of the day, that conditioned the whole life of man. Fearing that the sun would never rise again, seeing it lose its strength in the winter, narrowing its course in the sky more and more, was a tragic experience that threatened his own life. Therefore, it had to exorcise it with rites that were intended to prevent the sun from rising more or help him at the moment of least strength.
During these festivals fires were lit (custom found in the Christmas tradition of burning the log in the fireplace on Christmas Eve) which, with their heat and light, had the function of restoring strength to the weakened sun. The term solstice comes from the Latin solstitium, which literally means “still sun” (from sol, “sun” and sistere, “to be still”).
If we are in the northern hemisphere of the earth, In the days that go from December 22 to 24, in fact, we can observe how the sun seems to stop in the sky, phenomenon all the more evident the closer we get to the equator. In astronomical terms, in this period the sun reverses its movement in the direction of “declination”, that is, it reaches the point of maximum distance from the equatorial plane. The darkness of the night reaches its maximum extent and the light of day the minimum. That is, the longest night of the year and the shortest day follow one another.
Immediately after the solstice, daylight gradually increases again and the darkness of the night diminishes until the summer solstice, in June, when we will have the longest day of the year and the shortest night. The day of the solstice usually falls on the 21st, but due to the apparent reversal of solar motion, it becomes visible on the third/fourth day following. And on December 25 it seems that the sun is reborn, which therefore has a new “Christmas”. This “astronomical” interpretation can explain why December 25 is a date of celebration present in cultures and countries so far apart from each other.
Yule Rituals
There are many Yule rituals, related to nature and also, in some way, to sun worship. There are also many ways to celebrate this holiday on a spiritual level: we can decorate our house with Farlas plants or make a solstice tree It is not a usual Christmas tree, but a tree decorated with many small representations of the sun.
Or also We can get up at dawn and greet the new sun. You can light candles or lights to represent the birth of our hopes for the new year.
The ignition of the trunk
A traditional Yule ritual is the lighting of the log. A large piece of oak wood is taken and decorated with branches of various plants: the yew (to indicate the death of the waning year), the holly (the waning year itself), the ivy (the plant of the solstice god), and the birch. (the tree of births and new beginnings). The twigs are tied to the trunk with a red ribbon. If we have also celebrated this rite the previous year and we have a piece of the old log unburned, we will light the fire with it, it is said: “As the old log is consumed, the old year is also consumed.” When the log catches fire, it is said: “Once the fire is lit, we observe its flames and meditate on the rebirth of light and our inner rebirth. We welcome our hopes, our dreams for the future, and we greet this light by saying, “Welcome, light of the new sun!” We toast with mulled wine and eat sweets, leaving a part of our party for Mother Earth. Later the ashes of the trunk can be spread in our garden or in the pots of the plants that we have at home to promote the health and fertility of the vegetation.
the branch of wishes
Another way to celebrate Yule is with the wishing branch, a ritual from the Celtic Breton tradition. Nine days before the solstice, you need to get a good sized dry branchpaint it with gold paint and hang it in the hall of your house, with a marker and some strips of red paper to keep nearby. Anyone who enters the house, if he wishes, can write his own wish on a strip of paper, which will be folded to ensure the secret of the wish and tied to the branch with a colored ribbon.
When nine days later the Solstice fire is lit (in the fireplace at home or in the garden or in the field) the branch is placed on the firewood and the burning wishes hanging from it will rise with the smoke higher and higheruntil they will be received by celestial entities and who knows, maybe heard.
What do I eat during Yule
As for food, traditional foods are nuts, fruits such as apples and pears, candies with caraway, soaked in cider. Suitable drinks are Wassil, Lambswool, Hibiscus, or Ginger tea.
The mistletoe
It was very important for the Gallo-Celts. The customs on the use of mistletoe as an element of good luck derive in fact in large part from the ancient Celtic traditions, customs of a population that considered this plant magical (because, even without roots, he managed to live from another species) and sacred. In fact, only the high priest could collect it, with the help of a golden sickle. The other priests, clad in white robes, would place it (after retrieving it on the spot on an immaculate canvas) in a basin (also gold) filled with water and show it to the people for ritual veneration.
Celts mistletoe was considered a plant donated by the gods and they believed that this little tree was born where the lightning had struck, a symbol of the descent of the divinity on earth.
The legends that consider the mistletoe closely connected with the sky and with the cure of all ills are also found in other civilizations of the world such as the Japanese Ainu or the Valo, an African population. Mistletoe is also a traditional Christian Christmas.