ᚶᛚᛂᚧᛁᛚᛂᚶ:ᛁᚢᛚ — Gleðileg jól!
It’s that time of year again.1 All my pagan and heathen friends are extra festive, sharing feasts and wishes of warmth with everyone. I love seeing their meals, offerings, and personal customs! After several difficult years (personally), I’ve found this Yule particularly refreshing. Having healed enough to celebrate again, I managed to do a bit more this year. I even wrote this poem while cooking my Yuletide meal:
May you find warmth and welcome
in the brighter days yet to dawn!
Merry may your holy halls become
filled with feast, friends, and song!
I altered the final line here, though. If you saw it on the solstice, it was “filled with feast and friends’ song,” but I prefer this revised version, personally. But anyway! Let’s get on to my festivities.
We’ll start with the vibes (aka decorations). I finally got a Yule Goat. I’ve been wanted one for years and years. I also got a pagan-looking Santa, wooden ornaments with a folksy (not racist) feel, a mushroom-foraging nutcracker, and a few seasonal lego sets to add botanical elements that I can’t accidentally murder through neglect.
The heart of the holiday, however, was the feast. My wife and I spent most of our day cooking and baking, making nearly everything from scratch at home. In the year to come, we want to make more things homemade. It’s a privilege, perhaps, but we enjoy it and it makes our treats feel a bit more special. Anyway! Dinner was a lamb-and-juniper-berry pie (with a hard-to-see sun drawn on the top crust), mashed potatoes (mixed with cheddar cheese), and warm glühwein:2
Naturally, there was also dessert. I begged my wife for gingerbread cookies for weeks, and behold! that’s what we made. We also planned to make homemade eggnog, but couldn’t find the can of condensed milk we swore we had stored away somewhere…so we made warmed spiced milk with honey, instead! It was a wise choice since we walked around the neighborhood admiring the lights beforehand.
We also did an other small things that didn’t quite fit in the smooth narrative above: we did advent calendars for the first time (tea themed), I mixed lingonberries in my extra-creamy vanilla Icelandic yogurt for breakfast, we enjoyed homemade chili for lunch, we exchanged books (a traditional taken from Iceland), watched a short seasonal movie, and spent the remainder of the evening reading. One highlight for this year, though, was receiving a Yule card from Amanda Ylva (thedruidsforest on Tumblr). Her card was such a warm addition to our table. I’m planning to send out Yule cards to friends next year, too! I’ve always wanted to do that sort of thing, but alas! time was not on my side this year.
So yeah, we really enjoyed Yule this year. The emphasis was definitely on enjoying time together, especially through making and munching on homemade goodies. That kind of warmth is, I believe, an important part of Yule. Rituals and offerings are great, whether they’re physical or expressed through action, but I’ve never been very good at that sort of thing. I mean well, but I’m quite clumsy about ‘properly’ expressing it—and that’s okay. As we rejoice in the return of light, let’s not forget to care for ourselves, as well. Do what feels right for you! The world is stressful enough without adding more, so be kinder to yourself, if you can.
ᛋᚴᛆᛚ — Skál!
Endnotes
- As always, I’m obligated to remind everyone that the ‘traditional’ Old Norse-Icelandic jól—that is, the OG pagan one—wasn’t actually celebrated on the winter solstice. King Hákon the Good moved it to align with Christmas, but it was originally in mid-January at the end of the old month called hrútmánuðr (also called jólmánuðr). That was the true mid-winter for the Norse. The holiday’s ‘realignment’ to the winter solstice is, I believe, a modern ‘compromise’ of sorts, wherein neo-pagans wanted to distance the old holiday from Christmas without the overcomplicated mess of explaining outdated calendar systems to everyone. It’s just easier to accept this mingled mess and be festive when it suits our modern hearts…so winter solstice it is! ↩︎
- If you’re curious about the cookbook in all those pictures, it’s The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook. I use it all the time. The pie itself isn’t a recipe in that book, but it uses the pie dough and an altered version of the juniper-berry lamb chops recipe for the filling. But yeah! It’s a nice book. ↩︎
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