How a Pagan Word Ended Up Decorating Christmas Instead

Many of the specific customs modern Wiccans keep at Yule, the log burned for luck, the evergreen boughs, holly and mistletoe brought indoors, entered mainstream English-language Christmas tradition centuries before the modern Wiccan Sabbat existed, absorbed into Christian midwinter celebration gradually over the medieval and early modern periods rather than surviving as a separate, continuously practised pagan rite waiting to be revived; by the time Gerald Gardner and early Wicca built Yule into the Wheel of the Year in the mid twentieth century, the word and its associated greenery were already thoroughly domesticated within an ostensibly Christian Christmas, most visibly fixed in the popular imagination by the elaborately described Victorian Christmases of writers such as Charles Dickens.

Modern Wiccans consequently draw the name and much of the seasonal imagery of Yule from a shared cultural pool that Christmas itself had already claimed and reshaped, rather than from an unbroken pagan practice running in parallel to Christian observance, which is part of why the same evergreen and log customs can be found, with barely any alteration, decorating both a Christian Christmas card and a Wiccan Yule altar despite the two festivals resting on entirely different theological claims about what, if anything, is being celebrated.