A History of Yule and Cultural Amnesia

Every December, the same argument erupts like clockwork.

“Christmas is pagan.”
“No it isn’t, stop lying.”
“Actually, it’s Saturnalia.”
“Actually, it’s Jesus’ birthday.”

And honestly, the argument itself is the least interesting part.

Because Christmas didn’t replace older solstice traditions.
It grew out of them.

Long before doctrine, people were already gathering at midwinter. Lighting fires. Sharing food. Hanging evergreens. Leaving offerings. Watching the sun closely. Trying to survive the longest night of the year.

Most of what we now call “Christmas spirit” (the lights, the feasting, the greenery, the warmth, even the winter gift-giver) is older than Christian theology by centuries.

And yet, when I converted to Christianity in 2022, none of that felt magical.

It felt dangerous.

---

My First Christian Christmas: Panic, Purging, and Fear

I was only a few months into my short-lived Christian phase when December arrived, and I suddenly found myself terrified that Christmas was pagan, demonic, or spiritually contaminated.

I burned books.
I threw away crystals.
I cleaned my home like I was preparing for divine inspection.
I interrogated every decoration like it might open a portal.

I’m not exaggerating. I recently found an old document I wrote during that time, and reading it now is unsettling. It reads like I took an entire bucket of fundamentalist talking points, sprinkled in some Wikipedia conspiracies, and shook it like a snow globe.

Here are real lines I wrote in 2022:

“Christmas is a religious holiday. But it’s not Christian.”
“Christmas is the birthday of the sun god Tammuz.”
“Mistletoe came from druids who used it for demonic occult powers.”
“Santa Claus is based on Odin and meant to deceive children.”
“Jesus does not want you to celebrate Christmas.”

I believed every word of it.

Because fear-based Christianity works by shrinking your imagination.
It makes symbols dangerous.
History suspicious.
The world a spiritual minefield.

That was my first clue this wasn’t JUST about theology. It was about fear.
And the inability to hold layered meaning.

---

Why Winter Was Sacred Long Before Religion

For pre-industrial people, winter wasn’t cozy.

It wasn’t aesthetic. It wasn’t symbolic. It was dangerous.

Food stores ran low. Animals died. Illness spread. Darkness swallowed the day.

When the sun disappeared, it wasn’t metaphorical. It was existential.

That’s why midwinter mattered everywhere, not because cultures shared gods, but because they shared bodies, seasons, and risk.

Homes were built from thick logs, stone, and earth. Materials with thermal mass that held heat long after the fire dimmed. Hearths weren’t decorative. They were survival technology. Families and animals gathered together because warmth meant life.

This wasn’t primitive living. It was skilled living. And it shaped belief.

Seasonal rites weren’t abstract spirituality.
They were instructions for how to endure.

---

This Isn’t Just Capitalism — It’s Cultural Amnesia

It’s tempting to blame modern capitalism for the way winter has been flattened into noise, urgency, and forced cheer. And capitalism absolutely accelerated the problem.

But that explanation skips a much older rupture.

Pre-Christian seasonal traditions already honored limits. Rest. Darkness. Slowness. Winter was understood as a time of contraction, not productivity. You didn’t push harder in December. You pulled inward. You conserved. You waited.

Those rhythms were disrupted long before department stores and advertising campaigns.

First came religious overwrite… seasonal intelligence reframed into theological narratives that demanded certainty and transcendence over embodiment. Then came industrialization, which severed daily life from land, daylight, and season entirely. Artificial light erased night. Clocks replaced the sun. Productivity became moral.

By the time capitalism arrived in its modern form, much of the damage was already done. Capitalism didn’t invent our disconnection from seasonal limits. It inherited it.

What we’re really dealing with isn’t just exploitation.

It’s amnesia.

We forgot how winter works. We forgot how rest works. We forgot how darkness functions as part of a healthy cycle. And once that memory was gone, it became easy to sell us endless brightness in the darkest part of the year.

---

What Yule Actually Was. Before Christianity Rewrote It

This is where the history gets interesting….

The earliest surviving written reference to Yule comes from the 8th century, recorded by the Christian monk Bede. Like much of what we know about pre-Christian traditions, it was documented after conversion had already begun. The traditions themselves are older, but the written record is fragmentary and filtered.

That timing matters.

Like much of what we know about pre-Christian Europe, Yule was documented after conversion had already begun. Earlier traditions were primarily oral, and many were actively suppressed or destroyed, which means the written record is incomplete and filtered through Christian authors.

That does not mean the traditions were new.

It means Christianity arrived late to write them down.

Later sources, such as Snorri Sturluson in Heimskringla (12th–13th century), describe Yule as a midwinter feast involving communal drinking, oath-making, ceremonial meals, ancestor honoring, and celebrations lasting multiple days, often twelve. By the time Snorri was writing, Christianity had already reshaped much of Nordic life, yet the seasonal patterns he records remain strikingly consistent.

The record is not pristine. But it is consistent enough to tell us this:
Yule was a land-based, seasonal response to winter, practiced long before Christianity and remembered imperfectly afterward.

So, when people talk about the “Twelve Days of Christmas,” they’re unintentionally echoing Yule, not the Gospels.

---

Yule Was Never One Thing — or One Date

There was never a single Yule and never a single calendar.

Some communities marked the solstice itself. Others observed the days before it.
Others celebrated after, once the sun’s return was perceptible.

Yule could last days or weeks, depending on latitude, climate, and local conditions. This diversity wasn’t confusion. It was responsiveness.

Seasonal traditions bent to land, not doctrine.
And that flexibility is one reason they survived so long.

---

Ancestors, Offerings, and the Household

Yule wasn’t only about gods. It was about the dead.

Midwinter was understood as a liminal time when ancestors drew near. The boundary between worlds thinned. Homes became places of hospitality not just for the living, but for those who came before.

Offerings were left. Food. Drink. Light. We still do this…. even if we pretend it’s just for children.

Milk and cookies for Santa didn’t come out of nowhere.
They echo something far older: leaving nourishment overnight, acknowledging unseen visitors, participating in reciprocity.

The modern story makes it cute.
The older story makes it sacred.

---

Before Santa, the Sky Was Crowded

Across Northern and Eastern Europe, winter solstice was associated with feminine figures of light, fertility, and renewal— many of whom traveled the sky.

In Baltic traditions, Saule carried the sun across the heavens. Among the Sámi, Beiwe rode through the winter sky in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, restoring fertility to the frozen land.

Darkness wasn’t evil. It was gestational.

The womb is dark. Seeds germinate underground.
Transformation happens unseen. That imagery didn’t disappear.

It migrated.

---

When Christmas Was Once Illegal

Here’s a part of the story that tends to surprise people.

Christmas was not always embraced by Christianity in America.
In fact, it was once illegal.

In the mid-1600s, Puritan leaders in New England viewed Christmas as pagan, Catholic, and morally corrupt. Everything associated with it raised suspicion.

Evergreens were considered pagan.
Feasting was considered pagan.
Dancing, games, and excess were condemned.
Even taking the day off work was seen as spiritually dangerous.

In 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law banning the celebration of Christmas outright. The statute read:

“Whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing labour, feasting, or any other way… every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shillings.”

Celebrating Christmas was a finable offense.

The ban remained in effect until 1681. And even after it was repealed, many New England towns treated December 25th as an ordinary workday well into the 1700s.

Early American Christianity didn’t preserve Christmas.

It rejected it.

And yet, winter rituals have a way of surviving rejection.

---

How Christmas Quietly Returned

Christmas didn’t re-enter American life through theology or church decree.

It returned through households.

Throughout the 1700s and early 1800s, winter customs persisted in small, domestic ways. Evergreen branches were brought indoors. Candles were lit in windows. Food was shared. Stories of winter figures and gift-givers circulated quietly within families.

These practices weren’t organized or ideological. They were inherited.

Passed down the way people pass down recipes, songs, and seasonal habits, especially in communities tied to land, season, and home.

They survived because they worked.

They made winter bearable.
They gave rhythm to darkness.
They anchored people to memory and place.

Over time, these household customs accumulated. By the mid-1800s, Christmas re-emerged into public culture, not as a restored Christian holy day, but as a reassembled seasonal festival shaped by folklore, family practice, and winter necessity.

Only later was it fully absorbed, standardized, and commercialized.

That shift, from household memory to mass reproduction…. changed everything.

---

Santa Claus, Commercialism, and My Mom’s Coca-Cola Bathroom

Santa is one of the clearest examples of what happens when household tradition gives way to mass culture. Early versions of Santa look nothing like the modern mascot. Long robes. Staffs. Hoods. Sometimes thin. Sometimes eerie. Often dressed in green, brown, or deep red.

These figures echo older winter travelers. Odin riding the sky, spirits roaming during Yule, ancestors moving close. This transformation accelerated in the 1800s, when American illustrators and writers began merging European folklore with newly invented holiday imagery.

By then, Santa took shape again.

My husband and I recently found a reproduction Santa figure based on an 1897 illustration. He’s dressed in a long green robe with a staff in hand. This style was common in the 1800s, especially in Germanic and Scandinavian traditions where the winter gift-giver was closer to a folkloric spirit than a cozy grandfather. Seeing him in that deep forest green, with that hooded, old-world posture, makes it obvious how far the modern Santa has drifted from his roots.

By the 1900s, Coca-Cola standardized him. Red suit. White trim. Jolly. Brand-safe. Growing up, this wasn’t abstract for me.

My mom worked for Coca-Cola when the company was based in Richmond, Virginia, in the early 1980s. My first word was “Coke.” Coca-Cola wasn’t just a brand in our house, it was part of the atmosphere.

My mom loved Coca-Cola décor. We had Coca-Cola signs, collectibles, and even a full Coca-Cola bathroom. At the time, it just felt normal. Cozy, even. Americana. Tradition.

I didn’t realize until much later how completely my sense of “holiday spirit” had been shaped by corporate nostalgia rather than ancestral memory. What I thought of as timeless wasn’t old at all. It was manufactured, standardized, and sold back to us as heritage.

That doesn’t make it evil. But it does matter.

Because when branding replaces ritual, something gets flattened. The symbols remain, but the relationship is gone. What was once seasonal, local, and embodied becomes aesthetic. Consumable. Safe.

And for many of us, that’s the only version of winter we were ever given.

That’s not a judgment. It’s just reality. Most of us weren’t raised with ritual.
We were raised with branding.

What was lost in that transformation wasn’t belief. It was relationship— to land, to season, to memory.

And the people who held onto that relationship longest were already labeled for it.

---

Why “Heathen” Never Meant Godless

The word heathen never originally meant immoral or evil.

It meant rural.

Its earliest known form, haithno, is feminine and means “woman of the heath” — the open, uncultivated land beyond cities and roads. From there it spread through Germanic languages: Anglo-Saxon hǣþen, Old Norse heidinn, Old High German heidan.

Clergy used heathen to describe those who kept ancestral customs while cities converted. The 8th-century monk Paulus Diaconus wrote of heidenin commane (the rural people) calling them “the wild heathen.”

Offerings to trees, springs, and stones were condemned as sacrilege. Over time, heathen merged with Latin paganus, meaning “rural dweller,” and gentilis, meaning “of another tribe.”

What began as a description of people who would not leave the wild became a moral accusation.

Later, the same language was exported outward… applied to colonized lands as uncivilized or heathen.

The fear was never really about gods. It was about land that refused to be controlled.

What Actually Happened, and Why the Old Ways Are Calling Back

The same patterns repeat across centuries: suppression, survival, absorption, and forgetting.

But we need to be honest about what that suppression looked like.

This was not a gentle handoff.
It was not mutual exchange.
It was not respectful evolution.

Christianity did not simply reinterpret older traditions.
It destroyed them where it could.

This is not rhetoric. It is history.

Historian Catherine Nixey documents this process in The Darkening Age. Early Christianity treated pagan traditions not as ancestors, but as enemies. Temples were smashed. Statues were defaced. Sacred groves were cut down. Libraries were burned. Seasonal rites that had structured life for centuries were criminalized.

This destruction was not hidden or accidental. It was celebrated.

Christian writers praised the demolition of temples. They mocked the old gods as demons. Beauty, pleasure, ritual, and joy were reframed as moral danger. Festivals became obscene. Feasting became gluttony. The body itself became suspect.

What could not be eradicated outright was stripped, renamed, and absorbed, while its origins were denied.

The solstice became Christ’s birth.
The returning sun became metaphor.
Evergreens became safe symbols.
Ancestor offerings were reduced to children’s fantasy.

This was not borrowing. It was conquest, followed by selective inheritance.

When that conquest met resistance in rural places, in households, and in women’s hands, it adapted. It waited. It layered itself over what remained.

That is why the seams still show. That is why Christmas has always felt haunted.
Layered. Conflicted. Unstable.

What survived did so despite institutional Christianity, not because of it.

It survived in kitchens and hearths. In fields and forests.
In winter nights and quiet ritual.
In land-based people who refused to forget how the seasons worked.

Centuries later, capitalism finished what religion began. What remained was flattened into nostalgia, branding, and spectacle.

Not because the old ways were weak.
But because they were powerful.

---

Why the Call Feels Loud Again

The pull people feel now toward solstice, ancestors, darkness, rest, and land is not aesthetic.

It is memory.

It is the body remembering rhythms it was trained to forget.
It is the psyche rejecting constant light, constant productivity, constant cheer.
It is old intelligence resurfacing after centuries of suppression.

The old gods were never gone. They were buried. Winter has a way of thawing buried things.

If something in you responds to the fire, the darkness, the offering, or the pause, that does not mean you are rejecting modern life or indulging fantasy.

It means you are responding to a pattern older than doctrine.
Older than empire. Older than the fear that tried to erase it.

What was destroyed is stirring. What was taken is being remembered.

In a few days, I’ll be sitting down with Universal Pagan Temple for a conversation on pagan culture, ritual, history, and lived practice, with Sigrún Gregerson, Pagan priestess and educator. If this piece brought up questions for you, about Yule, Mother’s Night, ancestor work, or what reclaiming these traditions actually looks like, I’d love to carry them into that conversation. Feel free to leave your questions in the comments or send them my way.

This is how the old ways return.
Quietly. Carefully. Through memory, practice, and conversation.