Adapting midwinter traditions in new circumstances

I walk down the gravel road to a thick forested place with the puny afternoon sun slanting in more from the south than from the west. I whisper thanks to the fir trees as I clip sprigs to make our Yule wreathes. Then I pour my water bottle out on their roots.

I’ve been doing that for fifteen years now, since before my kids were born. It’s family tradition—the natural wreath so bushy that it gets in the way of opening the door. I used to prune the fir trees at the top of our garden in the Czech Republic to make each season’s wreath.

When I lived here as a kid, I didn’t know about thanking the trees or giving water in offering or even how to make the sprigs into a wreath, let alone the symbol of the wreath as a sunwise spinning circle of life and rebirth. But there was family tradition then too, and that tradition said we gathered bows and a tree from this woodlot each December and carried them home on foot.

Image by Arie Farnam

The Winter Solstice is always a mix of tradition and adaptation for me. When I was a kid we had a beautiful wooden nativity scene that Mama let us set up. We always went out and got a tree, we had stockings and Santa Claus and special family cookie recipes. We called it “Christmas” then, but the nativity scene was the only part Jesus had in it and there was often some discussion of the Solstice. It was a mix of my mother’s memories of childhood and her attempts to make something “more meaningful” than commercial Christmas for her children.

A perfect symbol of this was her adaptation of a Christmas pinwheel cookie recipe. The cookies were probably okay to begin with, since they did have real melted chocolate in them, but the other half of the dough was just vanilla. At some point during my childhood, Mama took that recipe and spiced it up by adding mint extract and green food coloring to the light half of the swirl. It instantly became a family favorite and I have made them myself every year since I stopped living out of a backpack.

Tradition swirled with worthwhile new things. That’s Yule.

As a young adult, I questioned a lot of the ways I was brought up, as we all do. But my questioning went a little differently than most. I didn’t have inflexible religious or even mildly conservative parents to rebel against. Instead, I had their 1960s indecisiveness to rebel against.

If it isn’t really about Jesus Christ to you and you don’t literally believe he was born on this day two thousand years ago as the literal son of God, then why do you call it Christ-mass? If trees were decorated and greenery brought in long before Christian times, then why are we still calling them Christmas trees at our house? If you believe in “the universe” and love the Greek myths as much as the one about baby Jesus, then why don’t we celebrate that?

Yup, I was a handful. But fortunately, I just grew up and decided to do my own thing. I started calling it Solstice or Yule and choosing wrapping paper that had stars and snowflakes instead of crosses or “Merry Christmas!” on it.

I taught my kids that Santa Claus is the spirit of the past year’s sun, the manifestation of abundance and having enough to share and give that the year gave us. We make sun-shaped cookies and put them out by the wood stove with a bit of salt and cornmeal (for the reindeer).

In the Catholic country of the Czech Republic, I learned to light candles in a ceramic advent wreath on the table, one on the Sunday four weeks before the solstice, two at three weeks out and so forth until all four were lit before the Solstice. There, Santa Claus was replaced in popular culture by Baby Jesus, who somehow despite never being pictured as having wings or any other transportation device, delivers gifts to all the children.

I just told my kids that’s the spirit of the newborn, baby sun. Christians call him Jesus. And then I usually got sidetracked into telling them about the historical Jesus and how he was a great teacher who believed in peace and kindness, so he is a good ancestor to focus on during Yule. My kids are understandably a little confused. I find uncertainty to be a good state to be in when it comes to spiritual matters, so I continue on merrily.

This is our first year back in America and together with my extended family for the season. And it’s got a whole different set of challenges. Mama is utterly burnt out on commercial Christmas, right when most of the grandkids are pre-adolescent and most focused on it. She has started mumbling “Christmas… Solstice… Yule… something or other…” in place of any one holiday name. And my niece and nephew who have a solid dose of Jewish culture from their grandpa pitch in with a cry of “And Hanukkah!”

My son’s school holiday concert featured several heavy-handed Christian songs, a couple of cheery general Christmas songs, a couple in Spanish and one in Hebrew, which was nice and all but not actually about Hanukkah. It was as if they were trying to look “diverse” without actually allowing for anything beyond Christmas-all-the-way-no-natter-what because that might offend the majority conservative Christians in the audience. But it was still cute and fun all the same.

I’m not a grinch. Really I’m not. A lot of Pagans I know are not into Santa Claus and I can see the argument. I could wish for less focus on the commercial aspects, but I also can’t help remembering the incredibly joyful excitement of being a kid on Christmas morning, tiptoeing downstairs with my brothers to get our bulging stockings with the giant candy canes, then talking and playing and waiting in happy anticipation together for our parents to get up, so we could open the presents.

There are people for whom family conflict or extreme poverty or parental indifference poisoned this holiday time. And trying to explain this to them is like trying to explain the existence of gods to an atheist. You’ve got to experience it to believe it and it even has to happen in the right stage of life for the experience to stick. But if you have it, it’s powerful, like a Salmon’s homing instinct. I’m as capable of denying my kids that as I am of not making them wear warm coats in the snow.

So many things will be different this year. My traditions will have to do extra adapting. I won’t even be “home” in my cozy little Hobbit hole of a basement apartment for the Solstice. I’ll be at my mom’s place far out in the sticks with my kids. I still plan to sing Solstice songs set to old Christmas carols, put together a feast of round foods on the eve of the Solstice and freeze bowls of ice to use as candle holders, symbolizing the sun reborn in cold and ice.

But the food will have to be a lot different for me. With new revelations about my health earlier this year came sweeping diet restrictions. The benefits to my health and energy have been so striking that I’m not much tempted to cheat for the sake of tradition. I let my mom make the pinwheel cookies and I won’t be able to have even one without paying with several days of exhaustion and inflammation. I still haven’t figured out exactly how I’m going to make my traditional star-and-moon decorated desert with only three or four grams of carbohydrates, but I’m working on it. There will still be a large platter of roast meat, baked pumpkin and a salad full of the colors of the sun.

A purist would find plenty to criticize in my Yule celebrations. I don’t follow any particular Pagan tradition very faithfully. It isn’t a senseless free-for-all of eclectic cherry picking, but it is adaptation and conscious choosing of those things that make sense given new circumstances. This I believe is the most authentic thing we can actually do with our holidays, adapt them as our ancestors have always done to keep the spirit alive no matter what life, location and circumstance throw our way.