Ho ho ho

All rightie, then! Merry Yule, Christmas, Saturnalia, or whatever you'd like to call it. I hope you're all having a good one.

Our own celebrations of what Birmingham City Council this year chose, in a characteristic fit of PC-pique, to call "Winterval" have just changed down to a more sedate gear, as today is my birthday. Yes, the Hedgewizard turns 40 today. Have I got time for a mid-life crisis? Well, I can't find one of my gardening gloves, so maybe that counts...

Like many pagan families, our celebrations are more spread out than the traditional, starting on the 21st/22nd (Yule) and running right through until January 6th. The reason for this is that although the solstice (shortest day) is on 21st/22nd December, an astronomical quirk known as precession means that the mornings don't start to get lighter until January 6th, the end of the Christian "twelve days of Christmas". Co-incidence? Actually... no. What little historians have been able to gather about the birth of Joshua ben Miriam (the closest we can come in English to the name of the man now known as Jesus Christ) suggests that he was actually born in February or March somewhere 10-2BC. There are historical and religious arguments to the contrary, but it seems likely that the early Church decided to celebrate during Saturnalia to avoid detection at a time when persecution was a very real threat, and so Christmas came to be held on December 25th, the date of the solstice in the Julian Calendar. Oh dear, where was I?

Ah yes, Yule. Stripping away all the modern symbolism, what does it actually mean to the self-sufficientish householder? I've been thinking about this since the open circle we attended at Maumbury Ring in Dorchester, when the sky was so clear and the temperature so low that when Sarah spoke of elder cultures' real fear that the sun might not return one day, I could quite see why. But there was another reason to be fearful, and that was simply Winter itself.

The modern self-sufficientish householder is, in the main, a bit of a flabby beast. I'm speaking for myself here, of course; I grow my own food as much as possible and try to cut down on my use of commodities including water, power, fuel and so forth, yet here I am taking power off a national electricity grid and living in a house kept warm mainly by oil from deep under the earth, and by a hefty dose of technology. All this is not lost on me. I realised at the circle at Maumbury, that if all these inputs were to fail we'd very likely be dead in a month. We wouldn't die of cold (not with our wood stores) and I guess we could draw water from the river about a mile away, but our food stores are decidedly low on staples so we'd go through what we have quite quickly. Perhaps the pressures on our pre-technological forebears aren't so difficult to understand, after all, so forgive me if I use the present tense for a moment.

Yule is the last of the sun festivals before the real cold arrives. The stockmen are casting a critical eye over the livestock, working out which of them are most suitable to cull to make sure there is enough food for the remainder. Likewise, some of the old folks will not make it through the cold (true even today), and so it makes sense to gather the family together. The sun will return, and yet we fear that some of us will not see it. Exactly for that reason, we will have a feast of the best that we have and we will eat and drink far too much. We will use the best charms that we have against the dark and cold, and we will bring fire into our homes, and we will give gifts to each other and to the spirits of winter.

Which, friends, is exactly why this Hedgewizard is planning on having a headache tomorrow. Over the Yule feast I have spent time with all of my family and as many friends as I could muster. I have given time to preparing the best food that I can, and drunk altogether too much wine. I have danced in the old sacred places, and given gifts and lit fires and made toasts. I have brought a tree into my home and decorated it, and slept and kissed and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Outside the garden needs attention, but apart from some emergency repairs all I've done is kept things ticking over. All that can wait - until Yule is gone.

Good cheer and best wishes, people, whatever you are celebrating - I wish you courage when you are cold.

This year's marchpane