Celebrating our first Yule
Or how we couldn't of picked a better time of year to change religions đ
Thereâs never a great time of year to tell your family you are changing religions â It will always feel like a tough conversation. But doing it around one of the biggest religious holidays of the year? Itâs even harder. For Americans, âthe holidaysâ, from Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Yearâs, are already loaded with stress and tricky questions:
âWhich side of your family will we celebrate with on the actual day of the holiday?â
âShould we try to visit both sides of the family on the same day and have two big meals (turkey*2)?â
And, if youâre a parent, âIs there anything we can possibly say that will result in our kid getting less gifts than last year?â
Take all of these questions, and add on the fact that we told our family in the few weeks before Christmas that we were now Pantheist. It was ⌠fun. Thatâs a story for another post, though. You could say maybe we shouldâve waited until after the holidays to tell them this. Or that thereâs a better way to handle this sort of thing generally. But thereâs never a âconvenientâ time to do something like this. You have to do what feels right. And how much practice does anyone have at this sort of thing anyways?
It also felt like if we didnât tell our family, we were somehow ashamed of the change weâd made. We werenât though. For the first time in years, I felt like I found a spiritual meaning to this season. Plus, our four-year old spends a fair bit of time with both sets of grandparents, so you know itâs all going to come out anyways when you hear her getting excited about picking out the âYule treeâ!
đ Traditions: Some Old and Some New
Pantheism, as you probably already know, isnât any kind of organized religion (insert the old joke about being a democrat here). But as I wrote in my first post, we felt it was important for us to share certain spiritual traditions with our daughter. That means this year, for the first time, we decided to celebrate the Winter Solstice and Yule.
Yule was originally a pagan holiday that started after or around the longest night of the year, the Winter Solstice. The people who celebrated Yule honored their gods and the daysâ growing length. By most accounts, Yule was one heck of a party â Twelve days of drinking and celebrations. The early church based the dates for Christmas around this holiday, to make pagans feel more comfortable with this new faith. These pagan roots, and the fact that Christmas celebrations in Europe still got pretty out of hand, led the Puritans of Massachusetts to not even mark Christmas as a religious holiday1.
We celebrated Yule a little differently than this. We didnât worship any of the old pagan gods. Pantheists believe the entirety of the natural universe is the closest thing we get to a âgodâ in the traditional sense. This means for us, there are no divine, all-powerful beings in the background of life. And we didnât do the whole 12 days of drunken debauchery thing, either (Maybe this should be an option if we get another 2021/2022 though).
Instead of all that, we see the Solstice as opportunity to reflect on our place in the world. We live in the countryside, on a small farm. Out here, the days getting longer really does feel like something to celebrate! And it marks a natural phenomenon that people have thought about for thousands of years. Before we understood what we do about the earth and the sun, it mustâve felt somewhat miraculous every year to see the light return.
What then did we do for the Solstice and Yule? Hereâs how it looked for us:
We setup a âYule tableâ where we placed a small alter to the season. In the weeks before the Solstice, we would do short reflections as a family around it.
On the night of the Solstice, we had a longer reflection time, with candles and lots of special snacks. We tried to all sit together as a family and think about what we were thankful for as the night grew dark. It was super peaceful and relaxing.
For Yule itself, we also kept many of the traditions of Christmas. For us, Christmas has often felt more like a cultural holiday, and we wanted to share those things with Lydia. So, Yule was a happy day, with Santa visiting, and gifts under the tree.
My wife had to work on Yule, but Lydia and I went on a hike that morning to get out in nature as well.
Iâll admit, how weâve celebrated Yule sort of feels like when you do a âfind and replaceâ in Google Docs. Weâre taking out the word âChristmasâ and putting in âYuleâ.
But like the early Christians building on a familiar holiday, weâre looking to preserve some of whatâs familiar while following something new. Our beliefs might be different, but that doesnât mean all traditions have to change.