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I’m coming into this a few days late due to my lack of internet access at home (one of the ways in which my partner and I choose not to buy into the pressure of cultural consumerism), but yesterday I read posts by both T. Thorn Coyle and my friend Dver on the topic of Christmas and pagans, both writers arguing that many pagans have become seduced with the commercial trappings of Christmas and its appeal to the masses at the expense of their own midwinter holidays and their own spiritual traditions. While I definitely agree with this line of reasoning in general terms, I feel the need to contribute a few points of my own.
First, yes, by all means, if you practice some flavor of paganism that has no legitimate ties to the Yuletide in all its various manifestations–if, for example, you are a Hellenic pagan, or Kemetic–and you have no other cultural or spiritual threads that tie you to the holiday (for example, I know Dver does have some Germanic influences due to the spirits she works with, and I know of other people who are deeply influenced by the cultural practices of their ancestors, despite the fact that their main path may lie elsewhere), then yes, I would agree that you would be better off having nothing to do with Christmas/Yule/Solstice/Whathaveyou, and just focusing your time, energy and money on the midwinter traditions of your own path, whatever they may be (and assuming that they exist at all). Sure, you may also have family obligations that weigh in on this, but I would argue that some pagans use these as an excuse to get caught up wholesale in December madness, simply because it’s easier to let yourself be carried away by that than it is to do the hard work and digging of uncovering your own traditions and following them. But hell, I think even Jews, who have a fine midwinter holiday of their own, are all too often guilty of making Chanukkah look an awful lot like secular Christmas with a menorrah, dreidel, and latkes. (Why yes, my mother was Jewish; how could you tell?)
However. For those of us who follow a Scandinavian or pan-Germanic or even English pagan path, the outer trappings of secular Christmas–the bringing in of trees or greenery to brighten the home, the lighting of candles and lights to give strength to the sun during this darkest time of the year, the fumigation with spices, drinking to excess, feasting with family and friends, exchanging gifts, going from house to house singing or just roaming around the countryside making a general ruckus (which has its roots in mumming, a Yule tradition myself and several of my friends have revived locally), the taking of oaths for the coming year, and even (or in my case, especially) the nighttime journeying of Santa (i.e. (Odin) through the storm-torn skies–yup, all of these things do indeed have their roots in Germanic paganism, and only became absorbed into the cultural celebration of Christmas in the first place because people refused to give them up. It’s easy to see why this would be the case in Scandinavia, parts of which remained pagan well into the middle ages, when most of western Europe had been Christian for hundreds of years. But even in 16th century England, Christian for nearly a thousand years, these pagan customs were so deeply ingrained in the celebration of Christmas that the Protestant Reformation had to fight long and hard to root them out–and even so, ultimately lost. People love their customs–all of the myriad little rituals that give structure and a sense of purpose to life–and will do almost anything to hold onto them, even when they may have long forgotten the initial meanings behind them.
So, if the secular customs attached to Christmas/Yule speak to you, by all means continue to practice them. However (and I’m sure you knew this second “however” was coming), do keep in mind that we are pagans, which in a predominantly Judeo-Christian culture automatically means that we have chosen to swim against the tide, to break away from the herd, to follow a religious path that is in most cases markedly different from the one handed down to us by birth or upbringing. For most of us, this also means that we had to do at least some work to map out our paths, to mark the boundaries and get the lay of the land; we read books, we researched, we talked with other pagans in person or online. Whether we are following someone else’s tradition or bravely forging our own, it took study and practice to break away from society’s norms, to do something religiously different from the default choices our families and culture set before us.
So, why stop there? If you want to keep the trappings of Yule, why just blindly follow along with the familiar customs when you can dig a little deeper and rediscover the meanings behind them–meanings which, in some cases, amount to Mysteries. For those of us who have a legitimate claim on Yule as part of our own religious traditions, I think there is a very real responsibility to keep in mind that for our spiritual ancestors (and for us as well, should we choose to keep the trappings) Yule is a religious holiday, not just an excuse for a midwinter party. In Snorri Sturleson’s Heimskringla (History of the Kings of Norway), we are told that it was Odin who established Yule, as a time to make sacrifice for good crops (which in modern times for those of us who do not farm could be rephrased as success in any endeavors) in the coming year. In his Dictionary of Northern Mythology (which is among the most vital secondary sourcebooks for most heathens), Rudolph Simek also refers to Yule (which is still the Scandinavian word for Christmas, by the way) as a fertility sacrifice, celebrated til ars ok til fridar (“for a fertile and peaceful season”), and he further points out that the focal point of this festival was not the Vanir (as one might expect), but rather Odin, one of whose names is Jolnir, and who had (and still has) a unique connection to Yule in His role as a god of the dead (the draugr, who are especially active on earth throughout the raw nights of Yule) and as a leader of the Wild Hunt. In fact, the connection between Odin and Yule is so strong that I would argue that pagans who are overly uncomfortable with Him would probably do better to disown the holiday altogether. Not that you need to be oathed to Him or even honor Him at any other time of the year, but recognize that for Germanic pagans, Odin IS the reason for the season, and that all the candles, merriment, decorations, drinking and carousing of Yule only came about as a hedge against the long dark. For at the heart of Yule are the dead and their mad, wild ride through the long nights, and the madness and ferocity of their leader, the masked god. At the heart of Yule is sacrifice (a word and concept many pagans shrink from), sacrifice in supplication to the Huntsman and His wild wights, to keep the dark at bay and to survive the long winter nights in order to live and prosper through another year.
And so I leave you with this cautionary note: that even for those of us who have a legitimate claim on Yule as part of our own traditions, there are still deeper traditions–and their meanings–to be uncovered. And I leave you with a challenge: to dare to enrich your practice and your spiritual life in general by digging deep, deep enough to uncover and understand the roots of the customs you embrace. Don’t settle for putting a pagan veneer on secular Christmas and then claiming to be authentically Germanic; we are better than that, or at the very least we ought to be.