Yule

Yule is the modern Pagan and Wiccan festival of the winter solstice (around 21 December), the longest night, kept as one of the eight Sabbats of the Wheel of the Year. It marks the turning point at which the sun is at its weakest and, from that night, the days begin slowly to lengthen again; in the common Wiccan myth-cycle it is the moment the Goddess gives birth to the sun-god, so that the darkest night is also the night of the light's rebirth and the festival's theme is hope in the depth of winter. Practitioners keep it with evergreens, holly and mistletoe, candles and the Yule log, feasting, and the exchange of gifts.

Historically, the modern Sabbat should be distinguished from its sources. The word Yule (Old Norse jol, Old English geol) names a genuine pre-Christian Germanic and Norse midwinter season, but the specific eightfold Wheel of the Year on which the modern Yule sits was assembled in the mid-twentieth century, largely through Gerald Gardner and the early Wiccan movement, drawing the four Celtic fire-festivals together with the two solstices and two equinoxes into a single ritual calendar that no ancient people kept as a set. Many customs now attached to Yule, and shared with Christmas, have tangled and much-debated histories rather than a single pagan origin. The festival is thus best understood as a living modern observance that draws, selectively and creatively, on older midwinter tradition.

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.