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It’s winter solstice the longest night of the year. It is the night when our ancestors huddled around fires and prayed for the return of the sun, or that’s what folklore and myth tells us. If Jon and I were purely Celtic Wiccans we’d celebrate today and be done, but we are eclectic Wiccans, which means we also have many of the traditions of the Germanic Wiccan in our belief system. (There is some debate among Wiccans and folklore scholars about whether Winter Solstice and Yule are indeed the same celebration, or not. We choose to divide them in our house.) Which means we also have Yule to celebrate. Yule is on the same day as Christmas. So technically for us it’s Happy Yule, not Merry Christmas. But for Trinity it is Christmas. She’s starting to go to church with Jon’s parents and is thinking seriously of becoming Catholic. Not my flavor of religion, but I believe strongly that God, or Goddess, calls us to our paths of faith, so Catholic is okay. That whole women can’t be priests thing, and the whole celibacy for their priests, just puzzles me. Luckily for us many of the trappings, decorations, food, etc . . . are identical between the two holidays. Which makes a duel celebration a very smooth one.
We open one present on Solstice, and divide the rest between Christmas eve and Yule, itself. We also put out extra treats for the wild birds on St. Stephen’s day which is the day after Christmas. The tradition in England, parts of Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, etc . . . was to hunt a wren and kill it on this day. There’s even a Christmas carol about it. I’m trying to make family traditions that reflect the family we are. We had a tradition from when I was a wee girl that we did this year. We do it most years, but this year it was harder. The first night you decorate the tree, you turn out the lights, and by the splendor of the tree in the darkened room you sing a carol. For my mother and I when I was very small, the carol was always ‘Silent Night’. I still can’t sing that carol without a certain level of grief, even after nearly a decade in school choirs. Trinity and have been struggling to find one we both know the words to, and want to sing. This year, it was ‘Let it snow, Let it snow, Let it snow’. She did it in the Christmas program, so she knows the words, and it was one of the carols I wrote the last book to. So we know the words, and it has not depressing associations. Either we’ve found our carol, or by next year Trinity and I need to learn all the words to ‘O’ Tannenbaum.’