Christmas or Yule

When and how? Just one, or both?

This article will also be available in our Winter 2020 newsletter, available here.

In the southern hemisphere, things aren’t so easy to move around. For our fabulous bottom half of the globe, Yule is just about as far apart from Christmas in the year as you can get. Discussions with friends and family can get a little strange when having to, for the first time, get other people’s heads around the fact that the date for Yule is tied to the winter solstice, not just a date in December. Here, the decision to celebrate one or the other can potentially lead to hard-to-reconcile questions and emotions around logistics, work, time, and sometimes disappointment. How do you figure it all out?

Can’t I just celebrate Yule in December anyway?

There are several answers to this question, all of them quite personal around your beliefs, and hence all of them are potentially valid.

If you’re celebrating Yule because you’re just getting started on your pagan journey, or you’ve decided you don’t want to rock the boat with friends and family by “celebrating Christmas at the wrong time of year”, or even if calling Christmas “Yule” just feels more pagan for you, then absolutely, go for it. Take this opportunity to explore the traditions of the yuletide celebrations in the more conventional time of the calendar year to do so.

However, if you’re trying to follow the cycle of the year – observing the equinoxes and solstices, and maybe the other sabbats too – then it may get a bit harder to justify observing Yule a half-year after the winter solstice, let alone the fact that it’s around the same time as Litha/the summer solstice.

Yule – a time to break from work

The southern hemisphere Christmas-time, on the other hand, is a time of year of more intensive management – watering, feeding, keeping track of supplies, etc. All of this is extra tricky if you’re off-grid or otherwise trying to be self-sufficient with growing your own food or materials. The long story short is that summer is, when you really think about it, generally a poor time to be having your extended, potentially weeks-long rest.

It’s actually thanks to this particular argument being a matter of practicality that this became the spearhead of our plea with friends and family to understand when we first started primarily celebrating Yule instead of Christmas. For the most part, this argument helped, but we needed more than just this to help our families get comfortable with the idea.

Celebrating Christmas

You may have friends or family that place a great deal of importance onto the day, for religious, sentimental, or other reasons. So you may be feeling immense pressure to “keep the Christmas spirit up” come mid-late December. Perhaps you or your family just enjoy the modern Christmas traditions regardless of wanting to embrace your pagan beliefs. It needs to be said that there’s nothing inherently wrong with indulging in a bit of Christmas, particularly if it brings you joy or makes it easier to manage your social contracts.

If you’re open to it (and have the time-off to spare during the year), one idea is to “celebrate” both Yule and Christmas at their respective times of the year. Christmas may simply be an easy to co-ordinate family get-together, and when seen in this light – where you just want to take a few days to see your family, especially if you don’t believe they’ll do the same for you over Yule – it may be easy to reconcile “celebrating Christmas” as merely enjoying catching up with your family with no particular religious or spiritual feelings attached.

Make time over Yule to see friends and family

If you’re going to be celebrating only Yule instead of Christmas, one of the best ways you can help potential feelings of unease from your family and friends is by genuinely committing. The most obvious way to do this is by seeing if you can take time off work around Yule and travelling to see friends and family, if that’s what you used to do for Christmas.

This is what we’ve been aiming to do for ourselves. For example, when we really got down to discussing it with my own mum (who doesn’t hold any particular religious significance or feeling about Christmas), the main reason she enjoys Christmas is because it’s a time when all of her kids (and her kid’s respective partners and/or families) get together and just get to hang out for at least a week. Once we all agreed that we’d help with organisation so that this could still happen (just at a different time of year), she couldn’t care less about the reasoning behind our change, as long as that reliable time together as a family stuck. Note that this means we have to be flexible from time to time: This year we were going to be interstate for three weeks – for a festival for three days of that time, and to see everyone and have Yule together for the rest of it. Thanks to COVID-19, we’re currently in negotiations with our families of when and how to see each other instead – most likely later in the year, possibly even over the Christmas/December period.

This may get harder for people whose families hold a special significance for the Christmas time of year, but take the time to talk with your family and see what it is they really care about. You may get lucky, and even if you don’t you may still be able to come to some other compromise that works for everyone.

A discussion of kid’s gifts

Another potential hiccup in the change is that, if you have kids, they may care about all their friends getting gifts in December when they’re not. Discussions around the importance of “material things” being put aside for now, we have the Litha Fairy show up overnight. Litha, being the summer solstice, is relatively close to Christmas (if a little earlier), and the Litha Fairy has a penchant for delivering very simple handmade gifts. For example, last Litha, our eldest (five years old at the time) got a beautiful home-made ribbon stick for her to twirl around and play with outside.

We’ve found this idea works well. She’s not “missing out” from Christmas-time gifts, and it’s in a “pagan-appropriate” manner in the sense that we work it into our other Litha celebrations. Obviously, if you like this general idea but not the Litha Fairy part, you can alter it to fit your own particular beliefs.

There are also several ways to handle the idea of Santa. As far as we’re concerned, Santa delivers his presents for you at Christmas if that’s what your family primarily celebrates, or at Yule if that’s what you primarily celebrate instead. Santa doesn’t mind much either way – breaking it up through the year means he has that many less people he has to get to on that busy December night.

The decision of whether you want to include Santa at all in your own Yule celebrations is one we’ll have to leave to each family’s parents. You could also consider swapping him out for Odin, given Odin’s highly likely influence on the character who would eventually come to be known as Santa (a topic for another time).

As always, it comes down to you and your family

The decision may be easy if you have people in your own family who want to celebrate both holidays. Likewise, it may be easy if everyone in your family only wants to celebrate Yule. Even if it may cause some consternation with your extended family and friends, just keep working with them in an open and friendly fashion to help them see your point of view, and I’m sure you’ll be able to come into a great arrangement.

Even better with a change like this, is the fact that you get to come up with new family traditions, specific and unique to your own family’s beliefs. Years down the track, this will likely be the point that sticks with you, giving you warm thoughts through the cold winter nights.