Being Heathen & Yule 2009

So what do I do when a holiday comes around? When my friends who are in kindreds are gathered together as a kindred celebrating a holiday, and I am without Heathens to celebrate with? I found myself in such a situation this past Yule. There are Heathen celebrations that have no analogs in popular life. Midsummer or Freyfaxi come to mind. Yule has the popular analog of Christmas, and Christmas has become a secular family holiday in this country. Or rather it has retained its family oriented folk traditions despite pressure from religious corners. It’s a very family thing to do, celebrate this holiday. The question is how does a man who is the only Heathen in his family celebrate Yule as a Heathen when gathered with a family of non-Heathens?

This is a modern American life we’re all submerged in, and the realities of it can be less than ideal at times. We phone our ex-wives and ex-husbands to coordinate where the children are going and when, who will have eaten what by what time so will we even bother to have dinner on this date? Who is buying what present for which child, and so on. “Christmas Eve” my sister’s family drove up from Pittsburg and I collected the children of my branch of the family: my youngest son, his sister and my niece. Exactly none of us are Christians, the holiday being an excuse to take off work and spend quality time with family. Just as it should be. We had a happy holiday chaos going on, and even being the only Heathen there I felt as Heathen as anyone by being immersed in all of that.

For 2008′s Yule I wanted to bring some ritual focus to the gathering, spurred by my Heathen impulse. I brought out a wreath and asked everyone to write a “New Year’s wish” on a strip of paper and then twined those strips into the wreath. On New Year’s I burned that wreath, sending the intentions of the family to the gods and ancestors. It felt like a very Heathen thing to do, and I approached in a way that was inclusive to everybody. It is not my intention to convert my family to my religion. Like I’ve said before, my family is my religion, and I don’t want to bring disharmony to that by shoving dogma down anyone’s throat. This Yule we did the same with the wreath, writing what are effectively Heathen Yule Oaths/Intentions (“New Year’s wishes”) and twining them together in a symbol of family unity. Ma had the idea to cut some sprigs off her holly bush and add them for decoration later, and that’s pretty Heathen to me as well.

Yule is more than just “Heathen Christmas”. In fact that’s more than backwards, right there. Yule runs from the Solstice through New Year’s. Heathens who have kindreds can do neat things like stay up together protecting the Yule Fire on Mother’s Night, and I suppose I could too if I could convince anyone to stay up with me until dawn. Someday I will, but for now that’s not the sort of thing my family would be into, and not the sort of thing I’d do by myself. After the hub-bub of the “Christmas” holiday I settled into enjoying time off from school and spending time with my father, who is on vacation from work. On New Year’s Eve we gathered at my folks’ house with a long time friend of the family, and here we are posing with our Yule Wreath. I opened a bottle of “Adam’s Mead”, homemade mead that I had traded a leather hide for from a friend in JBK, and drank out of my horn, my precious gift from another friend in JBK. My mother and her friend Susan were interested in the idea of sumbeling, so I explained about the tradition and then we talked about the goddess Freya after my mother had felt compelled, for reasons of her own, to toast to Freya.

Susan wanted to do something of her own to add to the New Year’s celebration. Ma had told her what I was planning for later, and about our Yule Wreath, so she brought some items over for her own ritual. It ended up being something like a Shinto water cleansing thing, and was more or less made up on the fly. In a mixed group you sometimes do mixed things. I won’t mix two religious things into one, but I have no problem with two different religious things done consecutively. I am, after all, a renegade Zen Buddhist, too. I will explain the “renegade” part in a later article, but for now will focus on this. For Susan’s ritual we used pure fallen snow melted in a pot that my mother’s friend Becky made, and a ladle that Susan purchased from a Native American artist at an art show. I would like to say we melted the snow by the fire, but as it turns out it was evaporating instead of turning to water, so I had to put it on the stove top. My father even participated in this, which honestly surprised me.

Something that I learned about last year but didn’t have time for was a Yule Goat. I was determined that this year I would have a Yule Goat for the family, and with the help of my mother it happened. On my birthday, which is the day before the winter solstice, Ma helped me construct this wonderful thing. The sticks are trimmings from a bush that lives in my mothers front garden, and it was a happy coincidence that my father had trimmed it just before I needed to construct this guy. The Yule Goat has on his back the Yule Wreath, and he carried it through the fire on his trip to Helheim and Asgard, carrying the hopes and dreams of our tribe to our ancestors and the Æsir. In this picture you can see the holly sprigs that Ma cut and I wove into the wreath.

I was pleased and proud that my family participated in this Heathen thing with me. Everyone, even my atheist brother-in-law, wrote intentions to weave into the Yule Wreath, and even my father, who I’m sure thinks I’m very strange, helped me to burn the Yule Goat. After the goat was burned we talked and drank until midnight, and then I went outside to shoot off bottle rockets and bang some pots together. I set off the neighborhoods first explosion, which was followed shortly by my neighbors and folk in the surrounding countryside sending up their more expensive fireworks. It was nice that after sharing the evening with friends and family I could share the moment locally and nationally, with everyone cheering and making noise and being happy together.

After burning the Yule Goat and ringing in the New Year I drove home. There I have a house shrine, the personal part of my Heathenry. I do things to include my family that aren’t overtly religious, but I do not shy away from direct actions of religion personally. The house shrine is for daily/weekly use, and is one of my personal ritual foci. I brought home a small plate of food that was representative of what we had eaten that night at my folks’. I wanted to ritually share the celebration with the ancestors and Æsir, even as I had just sent a sacrifice trip-tropping their way. I turned on my electric candles, lit some frankincense filled the cauldron with Adam’s Mead and placed the food before them. I need to get smaller plates specifically for the new house shrine, as the regular ones don’t fit on it. Then I sat down and read out of the Prose Edda the story of the creation of the world and named and honored the Æsir. Then I spoke directly to the ancestors, telling them of the past year and reaffirming my Yule Oaths. After all of that I went to bed, satisfied that this past year was a good and productive one, and confident that the coming year would be better, and that my Heathen Yule was a happy success filled with family and gladness.

More Yule 2009 pictures can be found here.

Reviresco!