Greetings to you all! We hope you’ve been having a fun and fulfilling start to the new year.
We certainly had an interesting new year ourselves, including a little introspection as to how we’re handling Christmas, and we thought some of our ideas might be of interest (and hopefully some use) to some of you out there!
What we were doing
Although we both grew up celebrating Christmas, some years ago we decided that for our own little family, we wouldn’t anymore. Instead, we have a fantastically fun celebration around Yule instead (which includes the full shebang – gifts, a decorated tree, travelling to see both sides of our family for a week or more each, etc.), followed by some minor gifts for the kids around the summer solstice, Litha, by our friend “the Litha Fairy”.
We’ve loved it so far. However, this past year things got a little disjointed thanks to a conjunction of many things happening all at once. Without getting into the personal details, the long-story-short is that Litha didn’t get the full attention we normally give it, and (particularly after 2020 didn’t allow us to see them much) we found ourselves missing our family a lot while they were interstate celebrating Christmas.
We feel we’re doing the right thing by ourselves in going for Yule over Christmas, for both practical reasons (trying to live off-grid, including having your own plants and animals, but then having to pay for people to come look after your plants and animals right at the start of the driest, hottest part of the year never made much sense to us) as well as spiritual reasons. After some introspection, we realised we needed to do a bit more to keep our morale up at this time of year.
Note: Not all (or maybe even many?) other pagans may encounter this issue, but for anyone who does and is looking for ideas to help manage it, this is for you.
Borrowing from Saturnalia
Saturnalia is a festival traditionally held around the 17th to 23rd of December, so it fits snugly against dates for both Litha (in the southern hemisphere) and Christmas. The festival itself was originally tied to agriculture and particular time in a season, but relatively quickly became attached to the calendar dates along with the revelry of the festival. As such, we’re happy to just follow the calendar dates of the festival itself to use it for Christmas.
Some of the key tenets of Saturnalia were role reversal, giving of small gifts (often gag-gifts), and a Ruler of Saturnalia. The more we looked into this festival, the more we realised it would fit wonderfully into our own pagan celebrations. So we’re going to use some of the spice from Saturnalia to keep our morale sky high on and around December 25th.
Litha and Saturnalia going forward
All our Litha celebrations will be going ahead as before. For example, we’re still going to celebrate with some simple hand-made gifts from the Litha fairy (as mentioned in our Christmas or Yule post), not to mention celebrations of the solstice, Keeping the Candle Company on the night of the solstice, and such. However, come December 25th, we’re going to have some Saturnalia goodness to keep ourselves entertained.
Each year, one of us is going to be dubbed the Lord of Misrule, whose job will be inspired by both the traditional Lords of Misrule and the Rulers of Saturnalia. For us, their job will be to cause frequent – though harmless – mayhem and pranks throughout the day. Swap the name tags on any gifts, hide things/food, swap people’s clothes for the day before they wake up, swap household items out for joke/gag items, etc.
The “Ruler or Saturnalia” also traditionally had the added benefit of being able to ask anyone at the festivities to do anything they thought may amuse them – dance, jump in the river, quickly finish your drink, etc. Though we might forego this one (we’re not sure how much our primary-age-and-younger kids will enjoy being “ordered around”), and just stick with the “Ruler” being an unadulterated agent of chaos.
Some small gag gifts will be given too. As we’ll already have given some gifts at Litha (including having received some from the aforementioned Litha Fairy), we’re really going to focus on making these simple, small, and most of all fun.
Role reversal may be an interesting one too. We’re going into this with an open mind and will likely just find out on the day what comes up as candidates for reversal, though we already have a few ideas. For example, though we may help them if they’re struggling (our kids will only be 4 and 7 years old in December this year), we’re interested to see what the kids manage to make for dinner! They can also follow up by doing the dishes and feeding the animals on the day, though I’m sure the kids will be excited to see us putting their clothes away for them if they’ve just been washed recently.
For another example, once the kids are older, the kids can have some money to go buy food for the dinner too, and we could do their chores while they’re off at the shop. And on and on it goes, only slowing if it stops being fun and starts grating on anyone’s nerves (after all, the goal of the day or days is to be celebrating and being in a joyous state of mind).
Looking forward
We’re excited to see how this new tradition evolves over time, while still keeping with the theme of the start of Summer being a time of needing to be on our property to help work and develop it.
Maybe we’ll find that this amount of celebrations works well, or perhaps we’ll feel that we want to add some more fun traditions into the mix (from Saturnalia, or from other traditional festivities). Either way, we’re excited to try it out at the end of this year.
Let us know in the comments what you think of this idea. IO SATURNALIA!
Much love and blessed be,
The Holly and The Ivy
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