Ho! Ho! Horus! (How Pagans Created Christmas [You're welcome!]): Part III: Yule love me in the morning!

As a child, one of my FAVORITE holiday activities was the installation of our Christmas tree. There is something about the wonderful aroma of evergreen pine filling the living room during those frosty Miami winter days, where the temperature can sometimes reach the low 50's! I recall fondly the decorating, the christmas music, and my mother bringing out the box of decorations from our foyer closet every December! We'd move the old record player to the side because our tiny townhouse didn't have enough space to house both it, and a giant evergreen tree. And of course, beneath it were my goods! My goods to mysteriously covet and salivate over until midnight on Christmas eve! Little did I know that this ritual was steeped in deep and ancient mystical, pagan, symbolism!

Those of us who live in Miami may not appreciate the symbolism of the evergreen tree, so I will briefly discuss how powerful this symbol is and why ancient people venerated it so. Picture if you will a frigid, white, landscape... Everything is dead or dormant, no leaves, nothing but skeletal looking barren boughs and branches. All around you is either white or brown except for one thing. One glorious, living, immortal thing. The evergreen. There are indications that the pagans did not actually cut down the tree and bring it inside, being lovers of nature and the overall natural order of things, they would cut branches from the tree and hang them on doors and inside their homes rather than murder a living being, this practice lives on today in the wreath.

It should be noted however that mankind has been cutting down and adorning trees for a very long time... How long? So long that the bible forbids it...

Jeremiah 10:2-4: "Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not."


The "decking with silver and gold" was a tradition followed by the Romans during their bitchin' Saturnalia festival! How 'bitchin' was Saturnalia? Pretty damned bitchin' by all accounts... A week-long festival where people drank, fornicated, gambled, and slaves and masters switched roles! That last one is my favorite, because had there been something like that in America, perhaps the slaves wouldn't have been treated so poorly. During Saturnalia it was common practice to go out into the forest and decorate evergreen trees with gold, silver, and caricatures of Bacchus (the fertility god, not the douchebag senator).


The tree is just one of many pagan practices we have absorbed into our 'traditional' Christmas celebration! The celebration of Yule is much older than Christ, it is the basis for one of our favorite Christmas carols, "The Twelve Days of Christmas". As a kid, I always wondered about that song because to me Christmas was really only one day. This is also the perfect segue into our next pagan practice! The Christmas Carol!


Fa la la la la, la la, la la! The Christmas carol as we know it has been in existence for over 1,000 years. It dates to a very old tradition from Anglo-Saxon times named "Wassailing" which existed in at least two forms. The first, was door-to-door Caroling, much like we do today, during which the singers would regale their hosts with classic tunes and would be rewarded with food and drink. The second, and much more mystic kind of Wassailing is the type done at fruit orchards. This type of Caroling was meant to scare away evil spirits that liked to hang out near apple trees. Wassailing was traditionally done during Yule.

The similarities do not end there ladies and gentlemen! Perhaps you are familiar with THIS sight? If you live in Miami, you sure as shit on a shingle are familiar with this sight... In other parts of the country, where people are afraid to look their dinner in the eyes, the whole pig has been replaced by the ubiquitous "Christmas ham". What would you say if I told you that this practice, particularly the whole hog with an apple in its mouth is a very old tradition that began with European pagans? Well folks, it is! The "Yule ham" is an ancient celebration stemming from Norse tradition... It was originally prepared and eaten as a tribute to the Norse harvest/fertility god Freyr who was also the patron deity of boars. Interestingly, though coincidentally, the feast day of this particular god happens to land on December 26th.


There is another Yule tradition that has survived to this day, that is the tradition of the Yule Log, which in some parts of the world is known as the "Ashen Faggot", no people, that does not mean a dark complected homosexual, faggot, in this sense, is used in it's true form, a bundle of sticks. We don't really do the Yule log here in Miami, because we don't have hearths and it's usually hot as shit even in December, but some parts of the country still "burn the Yule log" to usher out the old year and bring good fortune in the new!


The point of this series has been to open eyes. We tend to live within a set framework of belief and reality which often times is lacking in perspective. Our traditions, which are sacred to each of us for our own reasons, come from very old traditions which were sacred to people then for a whole different reason. In our self-important culture we sometimes lose sight of just how ignorant we are and how knowledgeable our ancestors were.


Christmas, Yule, whatever you want to call it, was a very important time for many cultures and it had *nothing* to do with Jesus Christ, who's supposed death and resurrection, in my humble opinion, could be considered a GREAT metaphor for the death of life in winter and reemergence in spring and no less relevant a symbol for what Christmas is SUPPOSED to represent, which is the end of one cycle and the emergence of the next. Whether Roman, Norman, Saxon, Gallic, or Christian the symbolism remained the same, fertility, luck, a good harvest, a new year. So the next time some snooty asshole tells you to "put the Christ back in Christmas" you tell them to shove their ashen faggot where the sun god don't shine then educate them...


Merry Christmas to all and watch out for the Krampus!