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Our Christian friends are often quite surprised at how enthusiastically
we Pagans celebrate the 'Christmas' season. Even though we prefer to
use the word 'Yule', and our celebrations may peak a few days BEFORE the
25th, we nonetheless follow many of the traditional customs of the
season: decorated trees, carolling, presents, Yule logs, and
mistletoe. We might even go so far as putting up a 'Nativity set',
though for us the three central characters are likely to be interpreted
as Mother Nature, Father Time, and the Baby Sun-God.
None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who knows the true
history of the holiday, of course.


In fact, if truth be known, the holiday of Christmas has always been
more Pagan than Christian, with it's associations of Nordic divination,
Celtic fertility rites, and Roman Mithraism. That is why both Martin
Luther and John Calvin abhorred it, why the Puritans refused to
acknowledge it, much less
celebrate it (to them, no day of the year could be more holy than the
Sabbath), and why it was even made ILLEGAL in Boston! The holiday was
already too closely associated with the birth of older Pagan gods and
heroes. And many of them (like Oedipus, Theseus, Hercules, Perseus,
Jason, Dionysus,
Apollo, Mithra, Horus and even Arthur) possessed a narrative of birth,
death, and resurrection that was uncomfortably close to that of
Jesus. And to make matters worse, many of them pre-dated the
Christian Savior.


Ultimately, of course, the ho liday is rooted deeply in the cycle of
the year. It is the Winter Solstice that is being celebrated,
seed-time of the year, the longest night and shortest day. It is the
birthday of the new Sun King, the Son of God -- by whatever name you
choose to call him. On this darkest of nights, the Goddess becomes
the Great Mother and once again gives birth. And it makes perfect
poetic sense that on the longest night of the winter, 'the dark night of
our souls', there springs the new spark of hope, the Sacred Fire, the
Light of the World, the Coel Coeth.


That is why Pagans have as much right to claim this holiday as
Christians. Perhaps even more so, as the Christians were rather late
in laying claim to it, and tried more than once to reject it. There
had been a tr adition in the West that Mary bore the child Jesus on the
twenty-fifth day, but no one could seem to decide on the month.
Finally, in 320 C.E., the Catholic Fathers in Rome decided to make it
December, in an effort to co-opt the Mithraic
celebration of the Romans and the Yule celebrations of the Celts and
Saxons.


There was never much pretense that the date they finally chose was
historically accurate. Shepherds just don't 'tend their flocks by
night' in the high pastures in the dead of winter! But if one wishes
to use the New Testament as historical evidence, this reference may
point to sometime in the spring as the time of Jesus's birth. This is
because the lambing season occurs in the spring and that is the only
time when shepherds are likely to 'watch their floc ks by night' -- to
make sure the lambing goes well. Knowing this, the Eastern half of
the Church continued to reject December 25, preferring a 'movable date'
fixed by their astrologers according to the moon.


Thus, despite its shaky start (for over three centuries, no one knew
when Jesus was supposed to have been born!), December 25 finally began
to catch on. By 529, it was a civic holiday, and all work or public
business (except that of cooks, bakers, or any that contributed to the
delight of the holiday) was prohibited by the Emperor Justinian. In
563, the Council of Braga forbade fasting on Christmas Day, and four
years later the Council of Tours proclaimed
the twelve days from December 25 to Epiphany as a sacred, festive
season.


This last point is perhaps the ha rdest to impress upon the modern
reader, who is lucky to get a single day off work. Christmas, in the
Middle Ages, was not a SINGLE day, but rather a period of TWELVE days,
from December 25 to January 6. The Twelve Days of Christmas, in
fact. It is certainly lamentable that the modern world has abandoned
this approach, along with the popular Twelfth Night celebrations.


Of course, the Christian version of the holiday spread to many
countries no faster than Christianity itself, which means that
'Christmas' wasn't celebrated in Ireland until the late fifth century;
in England, Switzerland, and Austria until the seventh; in Germany until
the eighth; and in the Slavic lands until the ninth and tenth. Not
that these countries lacked their own mid-winter celebrations of
Yuletide. Long before the world had heard of Jesus, Pagans had been
observing the season by bringing in the Yule log, wishing on it, and
lighting it from the remains of last year's log. Riddles were posed
and answered, magic and rituals were practiced, wild boars were
sacrificed and consumed along with large quantities of liquor, corn
dollies were carried from house to house while carolling, fertility
rites were practiced (girls standing under a sprig of mistletoe were
subject to a bit more than a kiss), and divinations were cast for the
coming Spring. Many of these Pagan customs, in an appropriately
watered-down form, have entered the
mainstream of Christian celebration, though most celebrants do not
realize (or do not mention it, if they do) their origins.


For modern Witches, Yule (from the Anglo-Saxon 'Yula', meaning 'wheel'
of the year) is usually celebrated on the actual Winter Solstice, which
may vary by a few days, though it usually occurs on or around December
21st. It is a Lesser Sabbat or Lower Holiday in the modern Pagan
calendar, one of the four quarter-days of the year, but a very important
one. This year (198 cool it occurs on December 21st at 9:28 am CST.
Pagan customs are still enthusiastically followed. Once, the Yule log
had been the center of the celebration. It was lighted on the eve of
the solstice (it should light on the first try) and must be kept burning
for twelve hours, for good luck. It should be made of ash. Later,
the Yule log was replaced by the Yule tree but, instead of burning it,
burning candles were placed on it. In Christianity, Protestants might
claim that Martin Luther invented the custom, and Catholics
might grant St. Boniface the honor, but the custom can demonstrably be
traced back through the Roman Saturnalia all the way to ancient
Egypt. Needless to say, such a tree should be cut down rather than
purchased, and should be disposed of by burning, the proper way to
dispatch any sacred object.


Along with the evergreen, the holly and the ivy and the mistletoe were
important plants of the season, all symbolizing fertility and
everlasting life. Mistletoe was especially venerated by the Celtic
Druids, who cut it with a golden sickle on the sixth night of the moon,
and believed it to be an aphrodisiac. (Magically not medicinally!
It's highly toxic!) But aphrodisiacs must have been the smallest part
of the Yuletide menu in ancient times, as contemporary reports indicate
that the tabl es fairly creaked under the strain of every type of good
food. And drink! The most popular of which was the 'wassail cup'
deriving its name from the Anglo-Saxon term 'waes hael'
(be whole or hale).


Medieval Christmas folklore seems endless: that animals will all
kneel down as the Holy Night arrives, that bees hum the '100th psalm' on
Christmas Eve, that a windy Christmas will bring good luck, that a
person born on Christmas Day can see the Little People, that a cricket
on the hearth brings good luck, that if one opens all the doors of the
house at midnight all the evil spirits will depart, that you will have
one lucky month for each Christmas pudding you sample, that the tree
must be taken down by Twelfth Night or bad luck is sure to follow, that
'if Christmas on a Sunday be, a windy winter we shall see', that 'hours
of sun on Christmas Day, so many frosts in the month of May', that one
can use the Twelve Days of Christmas to predict the weather for each of
the twelve months of the coming year, and so on.


Remembering that most Christmas customs are ultimately based upon older
Pagan customs, it only remains for modern Pagans to reclaim their lost
traditions. In doing so, we can share many common customs with our
Christian friends, albeit with a slightly different interpretation.
And thus we all share in the beauty of this most magical of seasons,
when the Mother Goddess once again gives birth to the baby Sun-God and
sets the wheel in motion again.


To conclude with a long-overdue paraphrase,


'Goddess bless us, every one!'


Mike Nichols...source...White Water's Mystical Forest

Merry Yule!! Have an awsome day and dont forget the meaning of Yule!