Yuletide Greetings

Hello, and welcome to the Brigid Trading Company History and Mythology Blog! Today is the last day of autumn, which makes it a perfect time to write about the history of Winter Solstice. Tonight is a very potent night: it marks the end of the shortest day of the year, and with tomorrow's sunrise, the days will begin to grow long and bright. Observing the seasons changing, like the turning of a wheel, was very important to our ancestors, and it's important to us here at Brigid as well. Let's explore the history and meaning of the Winter Solstice!

Seasonal History

As many people know nowadays (largely thanks to the invention of the internet), Christmas is far from an exclusively Christian holiday. Whether or not December 25th actually coincides with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is a question best left up to experts on the subject, but it can be said unequivocally that many of our familiar trappings of Christmas are lifted straight from the ages of European paganism.

In all the stories of the Bible, one thing that is missing is the decorating of evergreen trees with festive ornaments and brightly-colored candles. The earliest records of the modern Christmas tree come from Europe's Baltic States, particularly Estonia, where Protestant Christians began to bring festively-decorated trees inside their homes around Christmastime.

Baltic Trees

For a bit of history on the Baltics, this part of Europe was one of the last to be Christianized, and pre-Christian people of the Baltics were even targeted with several Crusades by the Livonian Order and the Teutonic Knights to force them to convert from their nature worship. Is it any coincidence that the descendants of those same tree-worshipers are who we have to thank for the Christmas tree?

Christmas Tree Culture Begins

Later on, Christmas trees would be embraced and popularized by German Protestants. It was also from Germany that the term Yule comes to us: being one of those seasonally-aligned ancestors mentioned earlier, pre-Christian Germans held major festivals on the first days of each season to mark the passage of the year, as well as to renew friendships and loyalties, celebrate weddings, children, and other occasions, and in the case of Yule, to gather and enjoy themselves as a community in what was often a harsh and competitive place to live.

The Yule tradition can be found in most Germanic languages: they share a root word that can be found in German (Julfest), English (Yule), Norwegian (Jul, or Jól or Jólablót in Old Norse), and even French (Noël), each of which is united by common Germanic sources. The regular appearance of Yule in so many related languages tells you how seriously it was taken across much of Europe.

Ireland

What about the history of the Winter Solstice in Ireland, where we at Brigid take so much inspiration from? It turns out that the Irish have been aligned with the passage of the season even longer than they have been Celts! All of the monuments you're familiar with from the British Isles are so ancient that they predate the arrival of the Celts, the English, and the Romans. The Irish word for Yule is Goile.

Stonehenge was built thousands of years before Celtic culture reached England; same with Newgrange, the enormous megalithic monument in Ireland, just outside of Dublin, which was once tightly aligned with the first rays of the sunrise on the mornings of both Solstices. Each of them were built by an indigenous monument-building people who existed in the same period of time as the pyramid-building Old Kingdom of Egypt.

Ancient Irish Yule

The pre-Celtic Irish were fixated on honoring the landscape by beautifying it. Everywhere you go in Ireland, the environment has been altered in subtle ways: pull over next to any cattle pasture and look off in the distance for a few minutes, and often you'll realize you're staring at an ancient fairy fort, a local term for any undisturbed ancient tomb or other monument respectfully (and a bit fearfully) left to overgrow with foliage, or the rolling concentric trenches dug around a long-disappeared ring fort.

Many of these ancient monuments were aligned with various phenomena throughout the year, usually an equinox or a solstice, but sometimes simply to something which the ancient Irish thought was worth building a monument to. For instance, it wasn't until a few decades ago that a local folklorist realized that the Boheh stone, a beautifully-carved Neolithic standing stone near the sacred mountain Croagh Patrick, is perfectly situated so that twice a year, if observed from the base of the stone, the sun appears to be rolling down the side of the mountain as it sets.

Folklore

In terms of folklore, there's plenty of significance to the Winter Solstice in ancient Irish mythology. Tonight is the last night of the reign of the Cailleach, the Hag of Winter. From now on it's a tête-à-tête between her and Brigid, the Maiden of Spring, who will begin appearing as the sun rises earlier and earlier in the morning - from tomorrow morning until the Summer Solstice. Eventually, the Solstice will come, and Brigid will reign supreme for all of summer before autumn approaches, the Cailleach reappears, and their eternal dance begins again.

Being a famously non-dualistic people (many Irish gods were often aspects of another god), it is believed the early Irish possibly regarded the Cailleach and Brigid as two sides of the same coin, with the Cailleach ascendant in winter and Brigid in summer. Like most things in life, it seems true that the boundary between the two are not as defined as you might think: out in our backyard, the lenten roses have already begun to flower, and it's technically not even winter!

Here at Brigid, we try to take the seasonal holidays seriously, so that the passage of the year doesn't seem like a grey, plodding march (ask me how I know that feeling), and tonight that means a feast and reflecting on the history of the winter solstice. We'll be lighting some of our Winter Collection scented candles and admiring our Christmas tree, while a big holiday dinner cooks in the oven. We hope you and yours have a Merry Christmas, a God Jul, and a Nollaig Shona!