“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.
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]
The Fires of Yule (2013) and Heart and Heart (2009) are both available:
From the Publisher:
https://www.authorhouse.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/417290-The-Fires-of-Yule
https://www.authorhouse.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/273120-Heart-Hearth
From Barnes & Noble:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/heart-x00026-hearth-montague-whitsel/1140694387?ean=9781438911984
[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.
