In cultures all over the world, this holiday season calls for us to light our homes in celebration and gather together for warmth and feasts…. but so few of us remember why. So many of our traditions have lost their roots!

The Hindu holiday of Diwali, the festival of lights, has come to its conclusion. Soon the streets will be illuminated with Christmas bulbs and Hanukkah candles will be lit. The bright star is placed atop an evergreen tree, the yule log thrown in the hearth fire.

Virgo the virgin rises in the night sky and wakes the dawn, drawing up the sun after the longest night of the year. In our popular mythology, the divine man is born from a virgin. In the neo-pagan path I tend to follow, this is only one part of a tale that takes a whole year to tell – the story of a self-renewing maiden and her lover-son, the cycles of light and dark.

The Wheel of the Year

In the springtime of life, the maiden and her love are young, full of flirtation, the chase of spring when the warm still flirts with the frost. As their relationship deepens, their passion heats up, warming the earth and germinating the seeds which grow ferociously bathed in the light of their love.

As the heat of summer reaches it’s peak, the lovers mature. They lavish in the fruits of their labor as we eat the first fruits from the trees…. but in that harvest, there is also sadness. The maiden Goddess knows that in order to ensure that the harvest continues to be bountiful, something must be given back to the earth. Something must be sacrificed. As the end of harvest nears and the cold creeps into the old bones of the crone, she sends her lover to the funeral pyre. The King sacrifices himself for his Kingdom, in some ways a metaphor for the ‘little death’, the millions of pieces of DNA-potential lost in every ejaculation, the sacrifice both man and woman must make to continue to flourish another generation.

When the cold winds blew harder and the world disappeared under a blanket of snow, our ancestors had many real fears to consider – was there enough food? Had they cut and stored enough wood for heat and cooking and melting fresh water? How long would they have to live with the cold before the sun once again heated the earth? How could they be sure it would warm up again at all? But the story of the maiden and her lover give a glimmer of hope. The King dies, but in his consort lives the seed of new life, a son who’s birth on the darkest night of the year heralds the coming dawn, the lengthening daylight and the receding cold.

Family Traditions

This year when we celebrate Yule, my friends and community will be connecting with our ancestral traditions. We will feast late into the night, keeping each other warm and entertained all night long, waiting for the sunrise, when we will honour the struggle of our ancestors and give thanks for all that we have today.

To pass the time waiting for dawn, we are also participating in a gift-giving custom of my Dutch ancestors, Sinterklaas, which is very similar to our modern “Secret Santa”, except that Sinterklaas gifts are meant to be funny, disguised or hard to find, the point being to generate laughter at a group celebration.

My nuclear family has few traditions of our own – most of the things that say “Christmas” to me are food. My mother’s variety of Christmas squares and goodies are enough to send me into a sugar coma for the whole holiday season!

Greener than Thou

The most important thing for my husband and I during this time of year is to try and make our new family traditions in our vein of green, sustainable living, doing what we can to downplay the commercial aspects of the holidays, eliminate any wastefulness, and donate what we can to others in need in our city. Our first Christmas as husband and wife we spent on a beach in Mexico and gave what we could afford to a fellow traveller and his family who had run on tough times. This year we participated in our local community family gift drive, so grateful to have so much that we can give to help someone else.

Many of the gifts we will give this year to friends and family are homemade or thrift-store finds. We worked hard making preserves during the summer and fall, have been collecting great consignment pieces and items from local merchants. For each other, we have called in favours and saved up (EdenFantasys!) gift cards for sexy stocking stuffers and erotic items we’ve been eyeing.

In the end, this holiday season is all about traditions. Not only do I acknowledge and pay reverence to the struggles of my own ancestors, enjoy the simple games they played and prepare the special food and drinks that bring me right back to my beginnings; but I make conscious decisions about the traditions I want to embrace in my own life, creating customs that reflect my own beliefs and values.