Posts Tagged ‘Yule’

A tiny fir we have had for over a decade was brought inside on the Solstice to dressing in ribbon and candles against the long night of war and sorrow.  In the times ahead, I will cling to this image.  Fir trees have long represented survival and sacrifice entwined.  Light your light for America and the troubled world……….shine in 2009.

Tonight is the dark….and for us here in Washington State, very dark indeed.  We have a violent snowstorm on the agenda for the later hours of evening, and possible power outages with winds of 50 to 90 mph.  In a few moments I will cook the main dish for the evening…a stuffing of smoked salmon and other things to go into a fish shaped pastry blanket.

I will set out formations of candles, because even if the electric lights fail, the house will be alight to call back the sun.  Tonight with family and dear friends, we will light the many candles….hailing ancestors and ancestral goddesses, the Disir, as well.  A little fir tree will be dressed in real candles and lit to send light and healing love out into the snow-stilled world around us.

Gifts will be exchanged by those who will hurry home running before the storm; darkness comes early here.  A fire in the fireplace will be kept alight, possibly all night.  And late, late, when all others are sleep, I may even take luminarias out onto the porch.

There are many kinds of darkness.  Let us all be many kinds of light!

I see a lot of unhappy people at this time of year.  This year is particularly bad: many jobs going away right before the holiday, a lot of illness and death seems to be plagueing folks I know, and a general sense of “what the hell NOW?” stalks America like a hungry cat.  That kind of misery I can do very little to alleviate, unfortunately.

But over the years, I have watched people celebrate the winter holiday, whether as Christian Christmas or pagan Yule/Solstice while waging a battle with themselves.  They actually hate the holiday that is supposed to be the “jolliest time of the year” even in good years.  The stress, the shopping, the relatives…it all gets to them.  And I don’t think it is all in their heads; I think there is a lot of holiday crap that everyone could do without and that would vanish if everyone remembered an old children’s story.

Remember the Little Red Hen?  Remember the story of how she worked her tail feathers off planting a crop, minding it all summer, harvesting, grinding to make flour and all by her worn out little lonesome self?  Because everyone else in the story was too busy and/or lazy to help her, right?  Gee, what does that remind some of us of in our lives—especially our holiday lives?  At the end of the Red Hen tale, she baked bread and suddenly EVERYONE was there, wanting some.  And she told them that they got nothing, just like they gave nothing!  Go Red Hen….you tough little feathered feminist, you!

Let’s apply that logic to the “hell” that this season can be for most women, shall we?  Most women work, and yet are expected to pull a perfect holiday out of their ass by December 25th (Dec 21st for us pagans), complete with prettily wrapped gifts, perfect decorations, home baked delights and spectacular meals and parties (and rituals for us pagans).  I don’t  even work any more.  And the idea still makes me twitch a bit starting around the end of November.  And I love this holiday season.  So what did I do to kill the twitches so I can go on loving the season?

(1) Prioritize.  I make a battle plan.  What I will bake.  What parties I will host, who will be invited and what they will BRING with them to help.  When I am on baking binge duty, for instance, the men of the house are responsible for supper cooking AND clean up.  Period.  Some times I do cook, but after washing dished in the wake of cookies, cakes and gods know what else, I am DONE with KP by about seven at night.  Their turn.  My first priority is to do what I FEEL like doing and not a damned bit more.

(2) Set Limits.  No, you do NOT have to invite everyone.  No you do not need to have a gift bought for everyone.  Yes you CAN make gifts…..gifts are not a right, but a privilege, so the person on the receiving end can’t have expectations that you are required to meet.  Now, having said that, I will say this does not mean you can be utterly inappropriate or insulting in your gift giving.  Giving Grannie an amusingly ugly sex toy is tacky.  Which brings me to #3.

(3) Have some Class!  Do the holiday because you love it, not as a requirement.  Get into the Zen mode of action—enjoy and adore the process and you won’t go wrong in gift selection, decoration or anything else.  Banish the Auto-pilot response.  Do what you enjoy and adore and ONLY that.  If you don’t feel like dealing with the expense or mess of a tree…well, screw it, DON’T!!    Simple and delectible is far better, most of the time, than careless excess.

(4) Say NO.  To anything that really pings your personal “OMG” meter.  Inviting drunk Uncle Sam, bringing home made stuff to the office party, giving gifts to neighbors, doing cards for every single acquaintance.  Come on, you all, by now, have had the Assertiveness classes, right?  Say no.  Don’t go in the financial toliet feeling you MUST buy stuff.  Quote the gifts of the spirit bit and let everyone DEAL.

(5)Please YOU first.  I know, sounds bizarre and selfish, but it really is not at all negative.  If you are coming from a place of satisfied joy, you are loaded with GENUINE and all will go better.

(6) Take Command.  If the Little Red Hen made a mistake, it was that she asked for help.  TELL people what you expect.  If you are sure they will not deliver even when commanded, well, then, fuck ‘em. Tell them since they didn’t pony up for your demand, you are not taking up the slack.  Whatever it is just isn’t happening cause they failed their part—Christmas dinner, gifts wrapped or whatever it is.  This is related to setting limits—limits for your sanity and their continued normal breathing pattern!

Take what you love about this holiday and magnify it.  Take what you dislike or despise and shit-can it.  Very simple.  Love and light, fuck ostentation!

During this holiday season, I am often spurred to thought about how we encapsulate and/or abbreviate the holy things of various traditions.

Is Santa, for example, only a commercial figure? Or does he represent something older and more rich in meaning? Obviously, most pagans have run across the writings linking him to older pagan figures like Wotan and the Wild Hunt. But I am not sure a “direct line of descent” is necessary to examine the significance of holiday symbolism. In Europe, one finds a regular quilt-work of figures less commercial and much more ambivalent with regard to America’s “Merry Old St. Nick” ideals. One of the more striking images, for me, is that not all gift-givers in Europe are male.

Russia, especially in the Communist years, talked about Father Frost; but a delicate, almost elfin female figure called the Kolyada (pardon spelling/tranliteration screw ups, please—operating from memory is dubious sometimes) was never quite forgotten. She, like our Santa, was sometimes said to arrive in a beautiful sled to grant good children wishes and gifts. A softened version of Baba Yaga…the story-time hag of Russian folklore, called the Baboushka (Grandmother) is sometimes presented as the gift-bearer as well.

In Italy, huge festivals are held in some towns, to honor the Befana. The Befana is portrayed as an ugly hooked nose witch, and is said to be an old woman who gave the Three Wise Men directions while refusing to accompany them to site of Christ’s birth. Ungrateful bastards, I say…..if that is what I thought the Befana really was; after all, why drag a frail old woman on such an arduous journey? But I find in the image of the Befana, the Hag figure of pagan belief. After all, while she is generous to good children, she is also known to punish bad ones. A balance a bit beyond Santa checking his list twice, I feel. Like the sweetened up version of Baba Yaga in Russia, there is a strengthened concept of justice in gift giving.

In Austria, the Perchten parade about towns in early December…in forms both beautiful and ugly. These female masked figures are said to represent the goddess Freyja and are associated both with winter and death. The Catholic Church once forbade these observances, but seemed to give up after the 19th century and revival of the old custom to the point of making them tourist attractions resulted. Other stories I heard in Southern Bavaria say that Frau Perchta flies…and she had better find your house and hearth clean if you expect her blessing in the season and the new year.

A similar figure, also spoken of in Germany is Frau Holda. In some parts of Germany it is she and not Woden, who rides with a Wild Hunt of special significance. She collects the souls of babies—by some accounts, those who die without baptism, and by others those who died of abuse or abortion. She flies in a wain (wooden wagon) instead of on horseback.(She reminds me of a similar function fulfilled for the ancient Greeks in the person of Hekate.) She is also the patron of women spinning, and her night is that final one before the 12th day of Yule—when she checks spinning wheels and looms, and like Perchta (to whom she may be related, if not the same) she expects to find good order! The elder tree is sacred to her, and its poisonous components seem to embody the possibility of punishment for transgression against her concepts of order and justice.

Even in areas where, like in America, the gift-bearers are only masculine some European countries maintain this sense of clear delineation between deserving gifts and deserving punishment. Bavaria’s St. Nicholas in his Church finery is accompanied by the hairy pelt-clad Krampus. Krampus is even represented, occasionally, with horns or antlers like Cernunnos or Herne! It is he, and not the Christian Nicholas who can tell which children should be punished with coal or switches! Young men dressed as Krampus race around small towns in early December (prior to the date of the Wild Hunt, usually) chasing children and young women…bringing to mind Roman rites of Lupercalia which comes two months later.

The Netherlands have their Sinterklaus and his assistant is the Moorish-garbed Black Peter. They try to politically correct Peter’s black-faced persona by calling it soot from the chimney that he enters to give gifts to the deserving, but of course, his Moorish dress belies that contention. He is in servitude for being non-Christian, and possibly for being non-white. And yet, every crowd welcoming the pair reveals more children dressed up like Peter than as his master! He is very popular, perhaps because of his more exotic nature or perhaps because of his perceived flaws making him more personable than his master?

I find myself wondering, annually in this season, how some people subsist on the blend of dry commercialism and saccharin religiosity splashed across America at this time. Of course, there are many Americans of many faiths who find a deeper personal meaning to the Solstice of the winter. They customize it into a festival of light and love, of family and home with or without the trappings of any religion.

For me, the images of the Befana, Frau Holda and Perchta are especially treasured. My Goddesses, while not of the Maiden, Mother, Crone triad, at winter show me a fourth face: the face of Death itself as the world turns cold and white. And it is not a hostile thing to me, but a tender and sorrowing embracing Mother clad in bones and dreams. The Hag gift-givers and Hunt riders are her scouts, and their purpose is to encourage us to live and love while we can!

The world here is black and white and gold here.  The white is snow that blew in with a winter storm, the black is the dark fir boughs the Northwest is famed for, and the gold is the whispery marsh grass peeking out of the wind-slashed marsh.