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A Toast for Thirteenth Night

In the life of each of us,

three great ales, three feastings,

and these are they:

the Birthal, the Bridal, and the Arval.

When we are born, the Birth-Ale,

when we wed, the Bride-Ale,

and when we die, the Grave-Ale:

whence Arval, meaning funeral.

And for that his is the life of us all,

the Birth-Ale of the Sun

lasts thirteen days, one for each Moon.

So on this Thirteenth Night of Yule:

On Sunday, December 19, 2021 (10 a.m. CST) I'll be addressing (via Zoom) the good folks of the Unitarian Church of Underwood, Minnesota. 

Have You Spoken with the Sun Lately?

Reflections on the Winter Solstice

A reporter once asked a witch: Do witches pray?

The witch smiled. We dance, she said.

Please join us Sunday, December 19, 2021, when storyteller Steven Posch asks, "Have you spoken with the Sun lately?", reflects on Indigenous European religion, and shares the songs, tales, and even—yes—dances of the Winter Solstice.

Poet, scholar, and storyteller Steven Posch (rhymes with "gauche") was raised in the wooded hills of western Pennsylvania by white-tailed deer (that's the story, anyway), and has celebrated the Winter Solstice since the tender age of twelve. He emigrated to Paganistan (which may or may not be Minneapolis, MN) in 1989, and has since become (gods help us all) a respected senior voice in the American pagan community. Current keeper of the Minnesota Ooser, he blogs at the wickedly popular Paganistan blog.

He also looks pretty good in a kilt.

Here's the odd thing this Yule: I've been experiencing a plague of flies.

What's odd is not the flies themselves, but the timing. Usually about a fortnight or so after I move the outdoor plants inside before Samhain, there's a hatching of flies. I presume that the eggs come in with the plants, and the warmth of the house hatches them out. Hence, flies. It always takes me a few days to hunt them all down. With flies, I've learned, you have to be pretty ruthless. If you don't get them before they breed, you'll be sorry.

This autumn there was no hatching of flies. At the time, I remarked the fact, but can't say that I missed them.

On the first day of Yule, though, I saw the first fly. The next day, there were a couple more. The next, a few more.

You know how it is with the Yuledays: things that happen then somehow take on added significance.

Well, the mistletoe is still hanging, and has been since Midwinter's Eve. Technically, this means that the house is under the bough, i.e. in a state of Yulefrith—the peace of Yule—and that nothing should be killed here for the duration.

I'll admit that this gave me pause, but only briefly. Call me impious, but in my house the Yulefrith extends to fellow humans and—if we're pushing it—to fellow mammals. Yes, flies are kin, too—We be of one blood, you and I—but when it comes to frith, I'm sorry: bugs don't count. As I've said before, sometimes you have to be ruthless.

So, I killed them as I saw them. Every day, through all the first Twelve Days of Yule, there were more flies for me to kill, like some sort of weird sacrificial holiday ritual.

Was this a seasonal anomaly, I wonder: the usual autumn hatching, come late? Did I maybe bring them in with the Yule tree, or with the holly from the yard that I cut and brought in a couple of days before Midwinter's Eve?

A buddy of mine once made the observation that omens imply the out-of-place. To know what's unusual, you first have to know what's usual. (He was dating a Druid at the time who, out walking one day, picked up an oak leaf from the ground and said: Oh, it's an omen of great good luck to find an oak leaf! as if this were some nugget of ancient Druidic wisdom.  My friend thought: Um, it's November, and we're in a stand of oak trees. Needless to say, that relationship didn't last long.) In Minnesota, flies in late December are out of place. So what does it mean that I've had an infestation of flies through all the days of Yule?

My hands-down favorite Jewsploitation film (yes, gods help us, there really is such a genre), is the campy, satirical 2003 Hebrew Hammer. Here's the story.

Evil gay Santa (hey, a little gratuitous homophobia always makes everything funnier, right?) formulates a plot to destroy all the other winter holidays by absorbing them into one big, undifferentiated Christmas blob.

So the Hebrew Hammer, a nebbishy Jewish superhero—he's straight, of course—teams up with the guy from the Kwanzaa Liberation Front (also straight) to foil evil gay Santa's evil plot.

Satire aside, you have to appreciate the very real problem that the film addresses. Christmas as we know it has become a cannibalistic microorganism that just wants to engulf all the other holiday amoebas in its environment.

Part of this, of course, is nicey-nice Kumbaya feel-goodism. See, we're really all just alike: we all celebrate at this time of year.

In fact, of course, we don't. Muslims, for instance, don't have a festival of lights at this time of year (or at all, really). Diwali, in late October or early November, is nowhere near the Christmas orbit.

Things get a little more complicated with Yule. Pagans like to think of Yule as the mother and Christmas the daughter festival, but that's really a pretty disingenuous reading of the relationship between the two. In fact—like it or not—our modern Yule has been reborn from the womb of Christmas, and the two holidays still look a lot (some of us would say, too much) alike.

Yes, it would be nice to think that, for a while, we can all just set aside our differences and celebrate together. But reducing all the other winter holidays to mere satellites of Christmas is no way to go about it.

So in fact, no, Yule is not the pagan Christmas, and we're not all just the same.

So what?

On Midwinter's Eve, we sing the Sun down from the highest hill in town and kindle a fire as it sets. This fire we keep burning all night. In the morning, we sing the Sun back up out of the Mississippi Valley.

Every year, as crows call overhead, and light and color stream back into the world after the year's longest night, I always think: this is it. This is real Yule, in the nutshell.

Let me tell you, it doesn't look anything like Christmas.

The Old Norse idiom for “celebrate Yule” means literally “to drink Yule.”

Where did you drink Yule this year?

To the ancestors, Yule was synonymous with, and unthinkable without, the special Yule ale that was brewed in quantity for the great Midwinter feasting each year. Most people drank beer throughout the year, but the Yule ale was always distinctive from the day-to-day brew, specially rich, dark, and high in alcohol. Medieval landowners were required by law to brew enough Yule ale to keep their families and retainers well-drunk for the entire Thirteen Days, and woe to the stingy farmer who tried to short his people of their Yuletide due.

On first Mother Night, we tapped the box of red.

It was a nice wine for winter: chewy, hearty, a little leathery.

Next day, there was still wine left.

On second Mother Night, we drank more from the box of red.

Next day, there was still wine left.

Tonight, Thirteenth Night, we'll keep on drinking.

As for tomorrow, we'll see.

I'm beginning to wonder if what we've got on our hands here may not be that legendary box of wine that, no matter how many rituals you take it to, never runs dry.

Born, born

upon this morn:

a sacred day is dawning.

Rise, rise

and walk the skies

of this Midwinter's morning.