Celebrating the shortest day and a new start 
Happy Yule!
Happy Yule!
Happy Yule!!
- Thread starter Broch
- Start date
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Yeh, that's what I have always taken to be the case - twelve days that the sun stood still, six days before the solstice and six days after. However, a specialist on pagan tradition recently told me that it actually starts with the solstice and ends on the 1st or 2nd January. I suppose that would explain why, when the Christian faith adopted the pagan festival period, it ran from the 25th Dec to 5th Jan.
I am now told that it varies depending on culture and, for some pagan people, the solstice is in the middle of festival!
There is VERY little record of what Celtic pagans believed or did. I’m a pagan Druid and all I’ve got to go on if I wanted to be a “reconstructionist” is nine (paperback) pages of Greek and Latin script, non of it written by Celts and certainly not by Druids. Those pages include is a lot of repetition and plagiarism and a page is taken up with human sacrifice. So in all - not a lot that I can use.
Luckily for me I’m also a postmodernist so the fact that my paganism is created by my own brain doesn’t differentiate it from the rest of the universe!
Only a few of our ancestors had an accurate henge to check the time so the midwinter celebration could have been quite flexible. May be it happened when the dried fruit and some of grain got past its best and got mixed into a “pudding” for a feast. The “blood harvest”, culling a herd or flock to what you could feed through the winter, was at Samhain, now Halloween but it’s possible that some of the preserved meat might have gone in too for mincemeat.
And that’s the point. All we can do today is make our own interpretation of what the ancients might have done. I guess they’d eat until the table was empty and the beer gone however long that took.
When someone looks at the seasonal shopping mall mayhem and asks “What has all this got to do with Christmas?”, I tend to think, “What has Christmas got to do with all this?. What I see is two or three weeks of (mostly) happy people in an illuminated and decorated street using up their reserves (money instead of dried fruit) to share with others. I could claim that it’s our version of the extended Roman Saturnalia (17 - 23 Dec) but that’s by the Julian calendar so the position of the sun wasn’t particularly accurate.
I freely admit that this is just a modern individual trying to interpret ancient thinking from script that has been translated by people with different agendas concerning folk whose beliefs we don’t know.
So let’s just get on with it, do what we will and have the best time possible.
Cool Yule folks.
Luckily for me I’m also a postmodernist so the fact that my paganism is created by my own brain doesn’t differentiate it from the rest of the universe!
Only a few of our ancestors had an accurate henge to check the time so the midwinter celebration could have been quite flexible. May be it happened when the dried fruit and some of grain got past its best and got mixed into a “pudding” for a feast. The “blood harvest”, culling a herd or flock to what you could feed through the winter, was at Samhain, now Halloween but it’s possible that some of the preserved meat might have gone in too for mincemeat.
And that’s the point. All we can do today is make our own interpretation of what the ancients might have done. I guess they’d eat until the table was empty and the beer gone however long that took.
When someone looks at the seasonal shopping mall mayhem and asks “What has all this got to do with Christmas?”, I tend to think, “What has Christmas got to do with all this?. What I see is two or three weeks of (mostly) happy people in an illuminated and decorated street using up their reserves (money instead of dried fruit) to share with others. I could claim that it’s our version of the extended Roman Saturnalia (17 - 23 Dec) but that’s by the Julian calendar so the position of the sun wasn’t particularly accurate.
I freely admit that this is just a modern individual trying to interpret ancient thinking from script that has been translated by people with different agendas concerning folk whose beliefs we don’t know.
So let’s just get on with it, do what we will and have the best time possible.
Cool Yule folks.
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extremely glad that days are getting longer again as my place sees no sunshine for about two months (which collides with our rainy season, so i'm constantly fighting damp gear...)
