“It is known that the Feast of the Nativity was observed as
early as the first century, and that it was kept by the primitive Christians
even in the dark days of persecution. …
the catacombs of Rome contain evidence that they celebrated the Nativity.” (18)
‑ William Francis Dawson Christmas: Its
Origins and Associations (1902)
“The Winter Solstice is a day of cosmic portents. ... Most pagan mysteries celebrated the birth
of the Divine Child at the Winter Solstice.
Christians also took this day for the birth of their savior god, Jesus
Christ.” (199)
‑ Elinor W. Gadon The Once
and Future Goddess (1989)
“The Celtic Festival of the Winter Solstice was called by the
Druids Alban Arthuan, according to the Bardic tradition. It was then that the chief Druid cut the
sacred Mistletoe from the Oak, a custom that still lingers, with our use of
Mistletoe as a Christmas decoration.” (359)
‑ Doreen Valiente An ABC of
Witchcraft (1986)
“We are born today in Christ, to this embrace and to this
peace. Can it be surprising that we feel
in our hearts the exultation of the divine light which streams into our spirit
from the presence of the newborn Savior and transforms us from glory to glory
in His image.”
- Thomas Merton “The Nativity Kerygma”
(1956)
For more than half a century I have had a deep connection with
the Winter Solstice Season, first to ‘Christmas’ and then to what I came to call
‘Yule,’ eventually creating a calendar around it focusing on thirteen days with
symbolic, poetic and spiritual associations.
For decades, now, this season has been the time when I re-turn to
myself; re-source, re-collect and seek poetic inspiration enough to adventure through
another year in the World_ without being of it; as much as that is ever
possible. It is an anchor – even
(especially?) when life gets hard and work gets difficult – that keeps me
grounded, and to which I return with relish, hope and devotion each December. The epigraphs above indicate something of the
journey I have been on; through Pagan and Christian mysticism especially, but
also through Music, Poetry, Philosophy and Literature.
At 66 years of age and tonight entering into the Season once
again, I am feeling led to look back and reflect on this life-journey that I’ve
been on. Here, for what it’s worth, is a
tale of my Dream of Yule and how it came to manifest poetic, imaginative and
spiritual form as I grew, matured, explored, finding my way to a place where I
am my-self; more fully realized than ever I was along the way—still yet on that
journey. What began as an aesthetic
attraction to the accoutrements, decorations and music of Christmas when I was
a young boy, has come to be fully realized in a schedule of disciplines,
stories and activities that reveal the nature of the Winter Solstice Season as
I have come to understand it.
I first really began reflecting on my connection to the Winter
Solstice Season in the mid-1980’s, after I’d already brought forth an initial
version of the calendar that came to be known as “The Thirteen Nights and Dayes[1]
of Yule.” In the midst of my journey to,
through and beyond the Solstice one year, I found myself pausing and asking,
“how did I get here? How did this come
about?” Devout introspection soon revealed
how the seeds of the spiritual and poetic calendar I was observing – and still
bringing to fruition – were sown in me from a very young age. My natal family’s observance of Christmas was
the context in which my emergent ‘self’ first learned of the mysterious beauty of
the day and the season surrounding it.
From early experiences of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I came to
anticipate it; just like many other children. The reception of gifts were of course always a
joy, no matter their size or how many.
But the beauty of the decorations as well as the weathers that seemed to
‘forecast’ the coming of Christmas; snow, wind, ice and cold—were integral to my
early experience as well. A whole existential
environment surrounded the event of ‘Christmas,’ which I imbibed with open
senses and an open heartedness that one can only really have at that age.
As to the gifts, they felt like an affirmation; first from
Santa Claus – of mine and my sister’s basic worth – and later of our parents’
love. As to the weathers associated with
Christmas, I remember snowstorms, or sometimes just light snowfall, hail and
windy nights, as well as the beauty of natural scenes, especially those seen as
we journeyed to my grandmother’s house at Thanksgiving and Christmas, enjoying
the Winter landscapes around us as we passed through the countryside. Denuded trees, silhouetted against a snowy
background, or a foggy morning’s veil, and then star-filled night skies on our
return trips; all of this made an ever-deepening aesthetic impression on the
soul of this Poet-to-be. As to the
beauty of the decorations_
One of the earliest memories I have is of my infant self in a
crib situated by a drop-leaf table, leaning back against the crib-railing and looking
up, fascinated, at a small evergreen bedecked with beautifully colored
lights. I remember being in the
crib; seeing the tree from that perspective. Later my mother showed me a picture of myself
in that crib, looking up at a Christmas tree; just as in my long-curated memory. The tree was not a giant one; it was probably
no more than three feet tall—but enormous to someone barely yet able to stand
up! I have often wondered if this
experience is one of the taproots of my emergent aesthetic sense as well as my
fascination with Christmas? Probably.
Other experiences added to this early one and others like it,
no doubt, increasing my attraction to the Christmas season. My parents once reminded me how, as a pre-adolescent
boy, I would go down cellar and get into the Christmas trimmings, stored in a
small room off the main basement—at any time during the year, hang them across
chairs and tables in the basement, cover the chairs and lights with a blanket, light
them and sit within this ‘tent,’ enjoying their beauty; the colors and the
illumination they cast. I have a vivid
sense-memory of this! Whenever I reflect
on this experience, I can almost feel myself in that makeshift
tent! Just for a moment or two, then the
memory fades. This was an aesthetic and
emotional experience connected to the beauty of Christmas in my Mind and
Heart. It evinced my growing love of the
Christmas Season, embodied in the aesthetics associated with its celebration!
Because of early experiences like those I’ve just described, Christmas
came to be at the very emotional and psychological root of my poetic sensibility,
which was also sourced in my love of music.
The aesthetics of Christmas and the aesthetic experience of music were
linked in my personal development. I was
listening to music as a toddler and probably while still in my mother’s womb,
as she loved music and would no doubt have been listening to it while carrying me. According to her, I was later singing along –
by the time I was 3 or 4! – to her collection of 45 rpm records. Buck
Owens, Elvis and Brenda Lee were among the artists in my earliest
repertory. Then_ The Beatles. She had bought the early single “Love Me
Do/PS I Love You,” and I could sing both songs by heart when I was in First
Grade. We then saw them on the Ed
Sullivan Show and while she was somewhat surprised at the length of their hair,
we soon bought “Meet the Beatles” together – that is, she took me with her to
the department store where she purchased it for us – and she liked the album as
much as I did! By the time I was 12 I
had every Beatle album, knew every song, sang them, and loved exploring the
lyrics; seeking meaning and insight into life in their words. I received three of their albums as Christmas
presents, Revolver, Sgt Pepper and the White Album—in the
last years of the 1960’s, being gifted with their music at Christmas linking
these two complementary interests.
During that same stretch of years, I was hearing hymns in
church and loved singing them. Every
December I sang the carols and Christmas hymns with what I could call in
retrospect a sensual, aesthetic enthusiasm.
I had favorite hymns and carols, and would sing the latter at any time
of the year (so I was later told; I would apparently belt-out “God Rest ye
Merry Gentlemen” or other carols at the slightest provocation!). I was also fond of secular Christmas songs,
and could sing them with relished enjoyment as well. Singing “Rockin’ Round the Christmas Tree” for
my 1st Grade teacher and class caused something of a ‘stir.’ (lol) The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album was one that
I loved and learned the lyrics to over the next couple years. The experience of church at Christmas was an
early aesthetic highpoint of the year for me, up until I was a teenager. I still love Christmas music, and have a diverse
collection of it that comes out in mid-November and stays out until
Epiphany! It is composed of sacred and
secular music, by country, rock and pop artists, as well as professional choirs
and classical music singers. It was
music that first taught me about rhythm, harmony and rhyme; an education that
prepared me to begin my Novitiate in Poetry during my adolescent years.
During those same adolescent years I explored Neo-Paganism,
discovering the mythos and traditions of wicche and magic associated
with what I found called “The Olde Religion.”
I learned that in various Neo-Pagan traditions the Winter Solstice is
one of eight festivals of the year called ‘sabbats.’ I was drawn to the winter sabbat each
December, learning about it from writers such as Doreen Valiente, Gerald
Gardner and others in the Neo-Pagan movement. C. A. Burland’s The Magical Arts:
A Short History (1966) was a text that contained numerous fecund
ideas and themes, referencing traditions that deepened my interest in Pagan
Yuletide customs. One such quote that I
would return to over and over again, meditating on its meaning, was:
“At midwinter the northern peoples had their fire festivals for
the bringing back of the sun, and all the ceremonial magic of the Yule Log for
the idea of the Sun was more important to them than to their southern
neighbors.” (56‑7)
I had been learning about the
relationship between the Sun and Yule, and this quote was one that introduced
me to the “Yule Log,” which was later to be featured in early Christmas stories
I wrote in the 1980’s.
Reading and meditating on Doreen
Valiente’s entry on Yule in An ABC of Witchcraft
(1973) not only told me of traditional evergreens and herbs associated with Winter
Solstice sabbat, but also gave me an idea of the ‘limits’ of a ‘season’ of Yule
that might continue into January. In this
favorite passage, she wrote:
“The evergreens for Yuletide decorations were Holly, Ivy,
Mistletoe, the sweet‑smelling Bay and Rosemary, and green branches of the Box
Tree. By Candlemas, all had to be
gathered up and burnt, or hobgoblins would haunt the house. In other words, by that time a new tide of
life had started to flow through the world of nature, and people had to get rid
of the past and look to the future.
Spring‑cleaning was originally a nature ritual.” (359)
The tides of life flow through all the
seasons, and I sensed that in Paganism as I learned it, they all flow back around
to the Yule, year after year. As a Pagan
I travelled around the “Wheel of the Year;” through each of the seasons—marking
them with sacred celebrations. There
were rituals, myths and magical practices associated with each festival, and through
this I learned to love each of the seasons of the year in poetic as well as
spiritual ways. The word “Yule” displaced
“Christmas” in my evolving poetic imagination for about five years, but my love
of Christmas was never diminished. It was
still being experienced with my family each year; its associations; the
decorations, the Tree and the gift-giving remaining as deep psychological
taproots with which I was still emotionally and aesthetical engaged.
No longer going to church at that time, however, I was drawn
to the natural beauty of the Winter Solstice Season, loving to go out for
winter walks in local woods and fields during Yule, therein finding taproots
and runes of meaning and inspiration. I
loved experiencing the flow of days from Thanksgiving to Winter Solstice,
marking them with stories, characters – gods and goddesses, Druids and Gwatra[2]
– and simple rituals. Out of my annual
adventure through the Yule arose the first tentative intuitions of a ‘Season’
with a pattern and series of motifs that could be celebrated from year to
year. Looking back, I see this as the seed-germ
of what later became the calendar of thirteen nights and days of Yule.
My involvement with Neo-Paganism, however, gave way to a
return to Christian traditions (for a variety of reasons that are too complex
to go into here) and by the time I was 20 I was involved in campus Christian
fellowships. During this time, I grew
spiritually and eventually discovered the Christian mystics and other deep spiritual
writers – like Thomas Merton, Otto Rank, Abraham Hershel and Evelyn Underhill –
who took me further than I had ever yet gone.
This shift transmuted my experience of the Winter Solstice Season once
again, re-linking it with the mythos of the birth of Christ and all the lore surrounding
that mystery. My spiritual and poetic
movement from a Christian to a Pagan and back to a Christian paradigm also allowed
me to begin seeing some of the parallels – and common ground – between these traditions. It would take a few years before I could
articulate this ‘common ground’ where Yule and Christmas were concerned, but I was
intuiting that, somehow, they were ‘linked.’ It was just at the end of this sojourn in
Christian spirituality and praxis that I discovered the mysticism of the
Nativity, the life of Saint Francis and how he initiated the tradition of the
Christmas creche! I was also beginning to
learn a bit about the veneration of Mary in the Catholic tradition. All of this intensified my attraction to
Christmas and to the Winter Solstice Season in which it was ensconced; like a
sacred tree growing in the consecrated ground that sustained it.
Then, beginning in 1980-81 – when I was starting graduate
school – I left religious and spiritual traditions behind for a time, finding
them unsatisfying (at various levels and for a number of reasons that are too
much to go into here)—discovering in the pursuit of philosophy and poetics sufficient
food for my soul; Mind, Heart and Spirit.
It was at this time that I started writing more seriously – though I had
been ‘scribbling,’ as I often say, since I was 10 years old – and beginning to
think of myself as a Poet-Philosopher.
As I reflected, consciously and critically, about poetics, creativity
and the role of the imagination in life, my love of Christmas persisted, morphing
once again, quietly yet powerfully, being imaginatively expanded into a full season,
which I began to call by the general name of “Yule” once more. Christmas became the consummation of the
Yuletide, at its very end. This was no
return to an earlier stage of understanding; either of myself or of the Winter Solstice
Season. What was emerging was a personal
mythos; an imagined and imaginary ‘world’ that allowed me to celebrate what I
was calling Yule-Christmas in a poetic and spiritual way, immersing myself, year
after year, in the aesthetics of December, both the aesthetics of Nature and
the aesthetics of the decorations we would put up, as well as the aesthetics of
the seasonal music I was collecting on record and cassette; always seeking that
experience of ‘the mystical in the ordinary’ that I’d learned of in Pagan
praxis as well as in the writings of the Christian mystics I’d read.
This ‘world’ soon began to be populated by characters who kept
Yule and Christmas in a unique tradition all their own. Those characters got a ‘name’ one day when I
was writing a Christmas-themed poem about them: The Whittiers. They lived on Deer Hill near a fictional
town in western Pennsylvania. Very
quickly, all of the Pagan associations of Old Yule I’d learned, imbibed and
treasured in my adolescence, along with all of the wisdom of the Christian
mystics and spiritual writers that I’d been mentored by, began to get interwoven
with my growing understanding of Christmas in secular, historical and
naturalistic terms.
It was at this time of my life that I actually became ‘aware’
of the natural event of the Winter Solstice, almost as if for the first time! Of course I’d read about it, as it is one of
the sabbats (called Alban Arthuan in Celtic Paganism), but at this time
I awakened to it as perhaps the most archaic ‘reason for the season;’ a natural
artifact of our planet’s revolution around the sun on its tilted axis—and began
to meditate on it as perhaps the primary rune of the whole mysterious Season
that I was experiencing and had loved and been aesthetically invested in all my
life!
Historical and theological studies of Christmas had begun to reveal
to me that many cultures have had celebrations of light, life and renewed joy
and hope at Winter’s Solstice. This brought to fruition my earlier sense that
there was some ‘link’ between the Pagan Yule and the Christian celebration of
Christmas. Many of the iconic traditions
and decorations associated with Christmas were drawn – being re-purposed – from
various European Pagan traditions. The
most central theme was that of the ‘Divine Child,’ born at Winter’s Solstice in
a number of ancient traditions. John
Matthews speaks of this in The Winter Solstice: The Sacred Traditions of
Christmas (1998):
“A surprising number of the gods of the ancient classical world
shared Nativity stories that would later influence the story of the birth of
Jesus. Among those recorded are Tammuz
(Mesopotamia), Attis (Asia Minor) Apollo and Dionysius (Greece), Mithris (Rome)
and Baal (Palestine). All are wonder
children, born under extraordinary circumstances and conditions are the time of
Winter Solstice.” (51)
While this book came along much later
in my life’s journey, it says what I’d intuited about connections between Yule
and Christmas and what I’d read glyphs of in earlier authors. As I discovered the symbolic and mythic connections
between Christian and Pagan celebrations of the Winter Solstice – including the
possibility that the early Church had chosen the 25th of December as
the birth date of Jesus because it was the Winter Solstice at that time
– I found the Winter Solstice event becoming the fulcrum of my whole Yuletide
experience, which then culminated, for me, in Christmas and the birth of the
Divine Child; known by whatever name he might be recognized, acknowledged and worshipped—as
I would later be able to affirm.
Out of this whole process of learning about Christmas and Yule
and discovering the Winter Solstice as a ‘natural event,’ as well as out of all
the early stories I’d brought forth about the Whittiers and their life during
Yule and at Christmas, soon came the creation of the calendar that I have now
long called “The Thirteen Nights and Dayes of Yule.” The odd spelling of ‘Dayes’ – which you will
find in all my writings dealing with the calendar – stems from the fictional
world that was evolving around the Whittiers. As I worked out their imagined history, I
‘discovered’ that their ancestor Egbert – who had come to the young United
States with his family in the 1790’s – had written a book by this title in the
first couple decades of the 19th century. The spelling of ‘Dayes’ stems from the
published version of his book in 1835. Egbert’s
book became a mystical and poetic touchstone for my imagination and a creative
wellspring out of which I imaginated the practices, rituals and myths that
brought the conception of the Thirteen Nights and Dayes to practicable
fruition. As I did so, my own practice
of Yule and Christmas deepened, bringing me to a fuller poetic understanding of
the Season in which I had become personally grounded.
This calendar fixed the dates of Yule as being from the 13th
to the 25th of December. Very
soon, as I began to write stories about the Whittiers celebrating and observing
the Thirteen Nights and Dayes, I began associating each day with an evergreen. These evergreens were said to be common around
the first Whittier Farm, in the woods and fields through which Egbert and his
wife Rebecca had wandered on their day- and night-hikes. Some of the evergreens were American versions
of similar species found back in Northumbria, where the family had come
from. Others – like Bayberry – were
indigenous to this continent.
As the Thirteen Dayes evolved, I played with different
evergreens for different days; looked into the lore behind these trees and
researched their ecology and the roles the species played in different
environments. Each of these evergreens
became a significant rune of the meaning of Yule and Christmas for me,
broadening my experience of the Winter Solstice Season. By 1987 I’d brought together a collection of
evergreens found here in western Pennsylvania, where the Whittiers ‘live,’ that
had enough symbolic heft and folkloric resonances to provide naturalistic runes
of ‘meaning’ to the calendar and my practice of it. It is difficult to summarize the impact my
imaginings regarding Egbert’s book had on my love of the Yule—Winter
Solstice—Christmas Season. Just as the
book became a touchstone for the Whittiers; who looked back to it for
re-inspiration in each generation, down to the present—so I found in it a
wellspring that was deep-sourcing a wondrous practice of keeping Yule and
Christmas in my actual lived-world. The
fictional world of the Whittiers and their Christmas traditions became a
speculum in which to re-imagine my own love of the Yuletide. This speculum was also used to imagine how to
live better in the world; more humanely—something the Whittiers were always
striving to do.
My spirituality; my philosophy and poetic aesthetics—evolved along
with my imagining the world of the Whittiers and their Yuletide calendar, both
of which had emerged organically out of my own lived-experience, growing from
early inspirations and intuitions, being modulated at each stage of my life by
the spiritual station – Pagan, Christian, Naturalistic – where I was sojourning
at that time, being enhanced through the aesthetic and mystical experiences I
was having, and then deepened by the historical, poetic and mythological
studies in which I’d engaged over the course of about fifteen years. The calendar arose out of an existential sea
upon which I was the voyager and into which I was a deep diver. It was no surprise when it finally occurred
to me that, during this whole process of world-building around the Whittiers, my
creative intuition had been drawing upon memories of two actual
locations in my existential world.
The first key
place was my maternal grandmother’s farm in central PA, to
which we oft went on holidays. I vividly
remembered Christmas being kept in that small farmhouse as characterized by its
physical warmth – heated by a wood-burning stove, the warmth of those gathered
together (my aunts and uncles, cousins and grandmother, with my sister, parents
and I) – and by the beauty of the squat evergreen tree (because of the low
ceiling) set-up in the small living room, lit up with lines of antique-looking
decorative electric lights. I remember
the artificial red wreaths, each with an electric candle in them – their red
lightbulb glowing – hung in the windows around the house, as well as a faux
(cardboard) fireplace in the living room, on the ‘mantle’ of which were set a
scenario of Christmas artifacts; especially important for this discussion was
the small statue of Jesus along with a toy Santa Claus looking somewhat like a
nutcracker or a soldier, and then a few elf-like figurines. _Here was another diorama of Christian and
fictional characters associated with Christmas also having – for me – Pagan
resonances!
The small farm was situated along the foot of a mountain, up
into which my cousins, my sister and I oft took hikes on Thanksgiving and Christmas. So many key symbolic images that flourish and
persist in my writing about the Winter Solstice Season can find their archaic
touchstone at that rustic subsistence farm and in the woods on the mountain
behind it where we kids rambled, adventured and hung-out!
The second key place was
an old, abandoned house down along the railroad tracks from the town where I
grew up. With other neighborhood kids I
had walked down the tracks and discovered that house in 1968. I visited that house with friends all through
the 1970s. It became a place of shared
solitude and creative inspiration. The
stories we imagined of how the house had been before the fire that brought
human dwelling there to an end suffused my imaginings of the place! I remembered these intuited tales and
intimations of ‘how the house used to be’ into the 1980’s, when I was in
graduate school and starting to write stories of the Whittiers, whose original
house on Deer Hill also burned_ in a devastating fire in October 1949.
That Old House along the railroad tracks became closely
associated for me with Christmas, as its rusticity – I eventually realized – reminded
me of my grandmother’s farm. I began
walking down to it during December in the early 1980’s, as the Whittiers were
coming to presence out of my creative imagination. There, a friend and I imagined meeting a
woman named Elisabeth Westley Mullen, who ‘revealed’ to us that her daughter
worked for the Whittiers in some capacity!
As that imaginating continued, the ‘daughter’ came to be identified as Lori
Ann Grayson; an adolescent girl who baby-sat for the Whittiers in
the 1940s and who became one of the Four Friends responsible for the
Whittier Reunion in the 1980s! The
landscape around the Old House began to be reflected in the topography of Deer
Hill as I was imagining it, with the two railroad tracks passing by it to the
east and a bridge over the creek between the two railroad lines that I came to
call ‘Willow Creek.’ The first house I
designed for the Whittiers was loosely based on the floor plan of that old
house amalgamated with memories of my grandmother’s house. Through the rest of the 1980’s and 1990‘s I
would venture down the tracks to that house around Thanksgiving or in early
December, there imagining ‘meeting up’ with ‘ghosts of the Whittiers,’
‘hearing’ (in my imagination) their stories of Yule and Christmas _then writing
down, when I returned home, everything I could remember of our ‘discussions!’
It was while on a walk down to that Old House in the
mid-1980’s that I had a personal revelation regarding the origin of the
Whittiers in my imagination and the evolution of the Thirteen Nights and Dayes. Visiting and walking meditatively around the
Old House that day, and then meditating while sojourning on a newly constructed
bridge over “Willow Creek” – just as a couple of my Whittier characters had
done in stories I’d written about them – I saw how the old abandoned house had become
an aeolian harp of inspiration, the wind of the imagination blowing through
experiences I’d had out there, making the house and its property a physical
source for the earliest Whittier Yuletide stories I’d penned. It was the place where I first started
speaking of the ethical dyad “Heart & Hearth;” a phrase I understood as
describing authentic human dwelling in Earth & Spirit and which later became
the title of my book collecting some of the most iconic stories about the
Whittiers and their world.[3]
By the late 1980’s the Season of Yule came to be ‘bookended’
with a doorway in, and a doorway out. The
Feast of Nicholas – on 6 December – became the entryway into the Season. Epiphany
– on 6 January; called “The Hinterlands” in the calendar and associated with
the Elves – became the day on or after which the Whittiers leave the Season and
enter back into their ordinary daily lives; journeying into the next arc of the
Wheel of the Year. This gives the
Whittiers and myself, and anyone else who wants to keep the Yule—Winter
Solstice—Christmas Season according to this calendar, a month in which to
prepare, enter into the poetics, stories, rituals and activities, experience
what they can and then return to their ordinary life in the world; hopefully
refreshed, renewed or possibly even with new insights into themselves and their
life-path.
The Yule—Winter Solstice—Christmas season was a fecund idea, teeming
with possibilities, the realization of which I could not contain within a
single paradigm! Very early on it began
to manifest in two forms; that of the Whittier calendar and then a Pagan
version of it arising out of a fictional tradition I was simultaneously
creating that I called “Keltelven.”
This imagined ‘tradition’ combined Celtic and Elven elements as I’d
learned about them in the early 1970’s as well as from my own research into Celtic
folklore, history, myth and magic. As
this narrative construct arose and got fleshed-out, poetically and spiritually,
I found myself writing stories about Keltelven practitioners – including Cornelius
Whitsel; one of the ‘authors’ of my book, The Fire of Yule (2013) –
their practices, covens and traditions.
The Keltelven version of the Thirteen Days of Yule is slightly different
from the Whittier version. A couple of
the days in this calendar are differently named, and the stories, symbols and
lore associated with each of the days is more deeply steeped in Paganism than is
the Whittier calendar; the Whittiers being more ‘secular,’ literary and
aesthetic in their orientation to life, though it, too, draws on folklore and
rustic symbolism. A brief outline of the
Whittier version can be found in my book Heart & Hearth (2009; pp
525-558).
"The giver of every good and perfect gift has called upon
us to mimic God’s giving, by grace, through faith, and this is not of
ourselves."
-
Nicholas of Myra
During the late 1980’s the Dream of Yule began to coalesce
into a poetic, philosophical and mystical template for the authentic living of life;
runes of an ethical praxis—what I intuitively called Life-together-in-Earth-and-Spirit. I was in my apprenticeship as a Poet and
storyteller, striving toward a style in which to express the dreamed vision I
had of how best to live life. During
this time, “The Legend of Nicholas and the Elves” began emerging
out of my creative imagination, coming into the Whittier stories as a new
element which further transmuted my poetic understanding of the Winter Solstice
Season. This tale of ‘Nicholas and the
Elves’ originally ‘wrote itself,’ so to speak. It flowed from my Heart and Mind
as if I’d already known it and was at-home with it; like it was already
familiar to me.
Though the character of ‘Santa Claus’ had long been present in
my Christmas imaginings and experiences, I had not really discovered Saint
Nicholas until the early 1980’s. I
‘found’ him and got to know him in histories of Christmas and then through his hagiography. Nicholas’ ministry – central to which was his
generous gift-giving at Christmastide each year; focused through his compassion
toward orphans, widows and outcasts – I began to think of as possibly the arche
of an ethical paradigm. He was
living in hope of alleviating at least some of the suffering in the world. This got me reflecting on how Nicholas was connected
with the more recent figure of Santa Claus. There was a clear relationship between the two
characters, which research revealed to have been an historical and cultural
transfiguration of the saint into the more secular man with the sack of toys on
his back. This transformation took place largely during the
19th century. Once I ‘saw’
the continuity between Nicholas and Santa Claus, the Legend came to fruition in
my imagination and quickly moved into a more central place in my Yuletide
praxis.
“The Legend of Nicholas and the Elves,” I came to understand, was
a story Egbert Whittier first told his family and then included in his 1835 book.
It has been handed down in the family
from one generation to the next, one person being chosen in each generation as
the ‘curator’ of the tales and all of the lore the family gathered together
over time. That person was responsible
for telling the story each year during the Yule and teaching adults and
children both to be able to tell it.
This story was not intended as an historical account of the life of
saint Nicholas, but was a fantasy in which the values of the family were deeply
instilled. It became, as Susan Jean Whittier (1916-1995) – a writer and ‘curator’
of the tales – once said, “The brand to light the Fires in the Heart of our
Hearts, year after year.”
The tale describes how a troop of Elves from Éire; an old name for Ireland – out
on a quest for wisdom – met up with Nicholas; the boy-saint – in his hometown
of Myra and, seeing the wisdom they had been seeking in him and his
compassionate ministry to those in need, offered themselves as his devout
assistants. They worked together for
many years; the Elves helping Nicholas to discover and aid those in need as
well as delivering gifts at Christmastide.
This ministry was built around three key values: Compassion, Generosity and Hospitality. I capitalize these words because they became,
for me, one runing of an emerging poetic and philosophical ethics. Eventually, at the end of Nicholas’ life, the
Elves took him north, intending to bring him back with them to their home in Éire, which was called Tara
Lough. However, by way of a series of
strange and mysterious experiences, they ended up at “The Top of the World” –
what we call “the North Pole” in our Santa Claus tales – from whence they were able
to continue their ministry to the lost and abandoned, orphans and widows, the
poor and disenfranchised, down to the present day. The story ends by exploring
how Nicholas came to be known by many names in different countries, over many
centuries, finally becoming transfigured into Santa Claus in 19th
century America.
A key theme in the Whittier’s Legend is that, right from the
beginning, in his mortal life, Nicholas had sought out helpers; those who could
assist him with his ministry—as there was too much for one person to do. There were too many people in need and too
much suffering in the world. While some
of his patrons took up the mantle and others imitated his compassionate work
amongst the poor, outcast and suffering – becoming ‘alter-Nicholases’ – the coming
of the Elves was a manifest and welcome answer to his prayer. Yet as they worked together through the years
of Nicholas’ life, they continued to try and inspire mortals to imitate
Nicholas, for even they were not sufficient to be able to help all those
in need. They lived in anticipation of a
world dispelled of suffering and hardship; a realization of what Nicholas –
being a follower of Jesus – knew as “the Dream of the Divine Reign,” as
Hildegard Whittier – the present curator of the tales – describes it today. She
says, “His ministry had begun with his desire to help other orphans like
himself, but then widened and deepened in its embrace; to aid all those who
were lost, abandoned or outcast, poor or oppressed.” In our modern Santa Claus mythos, this theme is
strongly continued, people being invited to become ‘Santa’s helpers’ and aid
him in his ministry in the world.
A striking element of the Legend as it emerged and
evolved was the way in which Nicholas and the Elves treated one another as
equals, both as persons and in terms of their beliefs and mystical experiences. Susan Jean Whittier once said, “Their
fellowship and eventual friendship came to be grounded in an open-hearted and
open-minded acceptance of one another’s spirituality and religious practices.” The Elves were Pagans – worshippers of the
Great Goddess. Nicholas was a follower
of “Jesus, the Carpenter God” – a title Egbert Whittier had given to Jesus in
his book. Instead of becoming ‘antagonistic’
toward one another in ‘reaction’ to their different beliefs, they told one
another their sacred stories and searched-out the wisdom that their respective tales
expressed. “Truth,” as Nicholas says in
the Legend, and as the Elves likewise believe, is like “a great crystal,
only a shard or two of which we each are able to comprehend in this one short
life.” Therefore, “we need to share our
truths – the shards we have discovered – and listen to one another,” seeking
the illumination that flows beyond and below the literal level of our stories; that
to which the devout enactment of our beliefs in rituals and celebrations actually
points. They did not attempt to
‘convert’ one another, but learned from each other and grew together in
Wisdom’s Henge. In this way they were
each transformed and ‘converted’ to the Wisdom as it was encoded in their
respective traditions. This sharing and
mutual acceptance evinces the ethic of hospitality in one’s relationship with
others, as gift-giving does in terms of material need.
The story of the Legend became a way of expressing what
I would eventually come to understand as “deep ecumenism;” a term I knew from
theological and Christological studies—and which for me meant that while the
old ecumenical cliché that “all religions say the same thing” was clearly
untrue, the Divine Mystery flows in and through the world in many guises. Faith has more to do with being open to the
ways in which the Divine moves in the world, seeking to become part of it; to
enter into the flow of grace—than to hold tenaciously to beliefs as mere dogmas. Wisdom – the kind of knowledge that enables
us to become the best version of ourselves and then to live life to the fullest
– is the revelation we seek in learning about and practicing religious,
spiritual and mystical traditions, secular philosophies and literary or mythic stories. Wherever Love is practiced and encouraged,
wherever Hope is fostered and wherever Faith opens one to wider experiences of
the Divine Mystery than might be expressed and encoded in any one tradition,
there the runes of Wisdom are awaiting to be gathered, like Hazelnuts from the Well
of Segais.[4]
This ethic, as it came to be expressed in the Legend; being distilled
from both Pagan and Christian as well as secular philosophies and poetic
movements into which I had delved over the years of my life to that point—infused
my imagined world with an ethical verve, which further deepened my experience
of the Yule—Winter Solstice—Christmas Season; the Whittiers and Keltelven
practitioners in my fictional world each taking on, each in their own way, its
ethical vision as well as its aesthetics.
For the Whittiers, “The Legend of Nicholas and the Elves” continued to evolve
as I imagined how the family was living throughout the year and not just at
Yule. Over the course of a couple years,
the Legend expanded to tell how Nicholas and the Elves carried on their
ministry from “The Top of the World” – called “Tara Lough” after the village
the Elves had come from in Éire
– down through the centuries until today. At every stage along the way, Nicholas continued
to strive to inspire mortals to become his ‘helpers’ in the world. I have desired and tried to be one of these
alter-Nicholases, however flawed and imperfect my attempts of enacting it have
been; seeking to embody the virtues of Compassion, Generosity and Hospitality.
Once this ethic started coming together for me, being worked
out experientially, spiritually and poetically, to imagine the Whittiers and
the Thirteen Nights and Dayes of Yule became a vehicle for imagining ways of living
it. Being inspired by and living
life through the values that came to be implicit in the Yuletide calendar has helped
keep me centered and passionate about living life well, as I travel from one
Christmas to the next, journeying through the year, poetically and spiritually
engaged with each earthen season in succession around the Wheel. I try and imitate the life of the Whittiers in
my own life as it comes into focus through stories and poetry I am writing;
their life intimating a model of one possible ‘best vision’ of my own—integrating
all the virtues I valued – learned from Paganism, the teachings of Jesus, Poets
and Philosophers. As I wrote about their
keeping of Yule each year, my own experience of the Winter Solstice Season
deepened, not just in terms of externals – decorations and the music I played
and listened to – but in my own emotional, psychological and spiritual
development.
“Hail Nicholas,
come to this house,
I bid you!
Bless our hearth and the hearts
that gather ‘round it.
Come back to us,
when the Season is full of light,
and haunt us
with your good grace!
Amen.”
- Egbert Whittier The Thirteen Nights and Dayes of Yule
(1835)
The Dream of Yule!
_It became a way of mapping my own spiritual life as I wayfared
through the 1990’s—and has remained so to this day. For the Whittiers, the keeping of Yule is
not about being religious (or anti-religious); it is about infusing life with a
poetic sense of meaning – what they call Poetic Naturalism – being
immersed in the flow of the symbolic tapestry that is the Thirteen
Nights and Dayes; being resourced along the way by stories, images, activities
and the experiences that can be had by participating in these aspects of the
calendar. Their goal – like Nicholas and
the Elves in Egbert’s story – is Wisdom; which is the kind of knowledge (knowing)—that
enables and empowers us to live life to the fullest by becoming the best
version of ourselves we can possibly be.
It is often difficult to keep the Thirteen Nights and Dayes;
things happen—work is often more taxing and tiring during ‘the Holidays’ than
at other times, and sometimes things fall apart in ways that cannot be
anticipated or redeemed. There are
personal crises. There are always things that need done_ and that cannot
wait for attention. Yet whatever
December brings, there is always the Yule calendar and all its stories, images,
metaphors and activities to return to, in which to find my bearings and refresh
my soul; Mind, Heart and Spirit—embodied as the physical being that I am. Even if I have no time to engage in the
activities on one day or another, I at least try and find a few minutes to
meditate on each day and its evergreen, morning and/or evening, refreshing my
energies and possibly re-sourcing my hope that a better world can be created,
for all humanity.
Today, the Thirteen Nights and Days have become an
internalized poetic worlding for me; I live them intuitively if no longer quite
as ‘mechanically’ as I did at first, before I understood their real character
as an expression of what the Whittiers call “The Spirit of Yule.” I often have a printed version of the calendar
out on my desk or pinned to the refrigerator, for reference. I usually read the text of The Legend of
Nicholas and the Elves on Nicholas Eve or at a significant point later in
the Season. The Dream of Yule begins to
awaken in me in early-to-mid-November, and as the 6th of December
approaches I decorate and try and set myself some kind of imaginary ‘destination’
or ethical goal for the journey to, through and beyond the Winter
Solstice. Imitating the natural world in mythic terms, I
find in it also a time symbolizing a spiritual death and rebirth – along with
the Sun; as the old myths have it—‘dying’ with the Sun at dusk on 21 December
and being ‘reborn’ at dawn on 22 December.
It is then time for journeying on to the Nativity and seeking the divine,
hoping to find it reborn in the Manger of the Heart through meditation on the
myths of the ‘Divine Child,’ each year, at midnight on Christmas Eve.
In sum, this is how I now experience and dwell in the
Yule—Winter Solstice—Christmas season, at this point in my life. My connection with Christmas has grown from
an aesthetic experience, through a long process of development into poetic and philosophical
expressions of those aesthetic experiences, finally maturing into an ethical spiritual
paradigm for my own living of life.
So mote it be!
Amen.
finis
“I have always thought of Christmas-time, when it has come
round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if
anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time; a kind,
forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long
calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their
shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were
fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on
other journeys.”
-
Fred, Nephew of Scrooge A Christmas Carol (1843)
“The world is composed of fictions and non-fictions; of that
which refers to imagined worlds and that which references the external,
objective world that we cannot change just by thinking about it differently;
though we can interpret it from a number of different perspectives. There are
true fictions as well as true non-fictions; the world in which we live can be
rendered out in either mode. We have the best chance of wisening if we
understand this; insight and meaning may flow from engagements with fiction,
just as with non-fiction.” (21)
- Robert Werner Returning to the
Earth (2006)[5]
[1]
This odd spelling stems from a book written in-world by Egbert Whittier
in 1835.
2 Gwatra—a
word referring to the wise women of the Celts; the female equivalent of ‘Druid.’ They were supposed to be of an order much older
than the druids; possibly pre-dating the origins of the Celtic cultures. They were equal in status with the druids,
and much venerated.
[3]
Heart and Hearth: Poetic Exploration of Authentic Human Dwelling in Earth
& Spirit (Authorhouse, 2009)
4 The Well of Segais – In Celtic myth, the
place where the Divine Trout (or Salmon) lived which, if picked up and held up
to one’s ear, might whisper runes of wisdom to the beholder. The mythic source of the Boyne River, wherein
live the Salmon of Knowledge. Around the
pool grow the Nine Hazelnut Trees of Poets and Prophets. When the Hazelnuts fall into the water, the
salmon eat them. When a seeker picks up
one of the salmon and holds it to his or her ear, the fish will whisper wise
and prophetic things to the hearer. For
Celtic Poets, to make an imaged pilgrimage up the Boyne River to the Pool of
Segais is to seek the fullest manifestation of one’s creative powers.
5 Robert Werner – a writer in my
fictional world of Ross County, PA. He
is a Poet who lived on Deer Hill as a boy, just up the road from the first
Whittier House. He later returned to
Deer Hill after the Whittier Reunion.