A Grove of Ashes and Aspens

Now Playing: The One We Shall Follow by Elvenking

The winter solstice: that time of year when everything is snowy and bitterly cold and generally just kinda cosy. (I am aware that it is summer for the Southern hemisphere, but I’m writing from a Canadian perspective, so work with me here lol.)

A lot of pagan traditions are mirrored in Christmas, mostly in relation to Saturnalia. (Think gift giving, decorating trees, the like.) I’m no expert in this field, so I can’t say for sure if there is a link there, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was.

Specifically in the Germanic tradition, the one I follow, the solstice is typically referred to as Yule. Name, spellings, and specific traditions, as with most pagan high days, will vary by region, especially when considering how decentralised paganism was for so long and continues to be in the modern day.

I have been incorporating my celebration of Yule into my family’s celebrations of Christmas over the last couple of years, just out of convenience. (My parents are divorced, so that can make things interesting.) Even still, I do enjoy trying to do at least something separately.

A couple years ago, my partner brought back some spiced mead from his hometown, and we incorporated that into a bit of a celebration of sorts. Mead is generally a good thing to use as a celebration drink, since it is quite sweet, but it can be hard to find.

There are recipes to make mead, and other seasonal treats, to be found free online, but I still have yet to try making any of them. I think making your own treats can be a fun way to celebrate. It’s a fun little thing to do, even if it’s not specifically for the season changes.

The solstice is also often seen as the official start of winter, though this gets complicated when dealing with colder regions where snow tends to fall and stay earlier in the year. This is just nature being weird and complicated, even if it is still just the longest night of the year either way. I tend to enjoy the extended amounts of darkness, since I tend to be more productive at night, but that’s just my own preferences coming into play.