Yule

Pagans can celebrate Christmas, and many do. There is no pagan authority to forbid it, and the decision belongs to the household. Most pagan families who keep Christmas keep it as a family holiday with the relatives and keep Yule as their own festival a few days earlier, and they share the tree, the greenery, the lights, and the feast between the two. A household that would rather not keep Christmas at all loses nothing, because every custom it would want is already part of Yule.

Yule is kept by pagans, and by witches, Wiccans, Heathens, and Druids within and alongside paganism. Heathens keep it as the Norse and Germanic midwinter feast. Wiccans and many eclectic witches keep it as the rebirth of the sun on the Wheel of the Year. No single religion owns it, and the word itself survives in several European languages as an ordinary name for Christmas.

Pagans eat a midwinter feast on Yule, built from what keeps through the cold: roast meat or a roast root vegetable, bread, nuts, dried and stored fruit, spiced cake, and something warm and sweet to drink such as mulled cider or wassail. Oranges and cloves, gingerbread, and a log-shaped cake are common on pagan Yule tables because they are common on every midwinter table in the north. There is no prescribed menu.

There are twelve nights in the modern pagan and Heathen Yule and thirteen Yule Lads in the Icelandic tradition, and the two are separate. The twelve nights run from the solstice into the new year and are a twentieth-century pagan convention with its count borrowed from the Christian twelve days. The thirteen are the Icelandic Yule Lads, who arrive one a night on the thirteen nights before Christmas Eve and belong to Icelandic folklore, not to the Wheel of the Year. A household may keep both, but they do not add up to one calendar.

The solstice and Yule are not the same thing, though Yule is kept on the solstice. The winter solstice is an astronomical event, the shortest day and longest night of the year, which falls between December 20 and 23 in the Northern Hemisphere. Yule is the pagan and witch festival that marks it, and in many households it extends across the twelve nights that follow. Anyone can observe the solstice; Yule is the name for keeping it as a festival.