Merry Christmas/ Happy Yule

Here’s to more light and goodness

Today is Christmas Eve, a few days ago was Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year, the start of winter, and the seasonal shift back toward longer sunlight. In just one week we will enter a brand-new year.

While Christmas is a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of the baby Jesus, it is only one of a multitude of holidays – from Hannukah to Kwanza – that take place during these dark winter weeks.

This time of year, I most strongly feel the energy of ancient indigenous and shamanic traditions which center on light emerging from darkness and new beginnings. During the week of long nights ancient holy men and women lit “yule logs” to push back the darkness and implore the gods or nature to bring back the light of summer. Indigenous people from every northern hemisphere continent held (and still hold) ceremonies and celebrations associated with shifting from the dark of winter to full sunlight.

Historically, and stacking up stories in the Bible, it is almost certain that Jesus was not born in winter. However, early Christian governments were unable to stamp out the ancient pagan celebrations, so instead, they laid the Christ story over top of them. I delight in the fact that so many of the ancient practices and symbols are still alive in the biggest Christian holiday of the year.

For example, mistletoe, being one of the few plants that stays alive and even bears fruit through the winter was revered by ancients for its ability to defy dark days. The belief that it increased fertility is at the heart of tradition of kissing under mistletoe. The Romans used to hang small metal ornaments on trees outside their home during Saturnalia. Each ornament had some kind of association with a god or even the family’s patron saint. Evergreen trees, and wreaths and garlands made of them, were significant to the Egyptians, Hebrews, and Chinese; the decorated trees represented eternal life. For the early Germanic tribes, decorating trees with fruits and candles in honor of the God Odin was a common practice. Even Saint Nick, Santa Claus and the red and white and white suit are holdovers from ancient pagan traditions.

As for the Christ part of Christmas, it took me some unlearning, healing, and relearning to get comfortable. In my mid-thirties I discovered New Thought spirituality and began the long and not always comfortable process of rethinking much of what I’d been indoctrinated with as a kid. Over time I released damaging concepts such as original sin, and a punitive, wrathful God who demanded the horrific death of its own child.

More recently I’ve reclaimed and reframed many Christian concepts including Christ. I believe Christ consciousness sparked into existence the moment God/Source/Divine Mind began to extend into material form. Christ is not Jesus’ last name but rather, a level of consciousness we each have access to when we are awake to ourselves as spiritual beings and moving through the world viewing other beings in the same light. Jesus was a human being who fully remembered his Oneness with God/Source/Creator and fully embodied Christ consciousness. I’d been taught that Jesus was an unobtainable exception but I now view him as an exceptional example, a way shower. He figured out something supremely profound and urged us to discover it as well.

Despite the fact that it’s unlikely Jesus was born Dec. 25^th, it seems to make sense to celebrate the coming of more Christ light into the world just as we make the shift from longer, darker nights back toward light and new growth of spring.

Along those lines I’ll close by sharing a wonderful and true story from the book, Humankind, by Rutger Bregman. The setting is the front lines of World War 1. In December 1914, just months into the war, already more than a million soldiers were dead. The front lines stretched some 500 miles and were marked by deep, filthy trenches from which the opposing sides fired at one another.

Bregman tells the story this way:

It’s Christmas Eve 1914. The night is clear and cold. Moonlight illuminates the snow-covered no man’s land separating the trenches outside the town of La Chapelle-d’Armentiéres. British High Command, feeling nervous, sends a message to the front lines: ‘It is thought possible the enemy may be contemplating an attack during Christmas or New Year. Special vigilance will be maintained during this period.’

The generals have no idea what’s really about to happen.

Around seven or eight in the evening, Albert Moren of the 2^nd Queen’s Regiment blinks in disbelief. What’s that on the other side? Lights flicker on, one by one. Lanterns, he sees, and torches, and …. Christmas trees? That’s when he hears it: Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht. Never before had the carol sounded so beautiful. ‘I shall never forget it,’ Moren says later. ‘It was one of the highlights of my life.’

Not to be outdone, the British soldiers start up a round of ‘The First Noel’. The Germans applaud, and counter with ‘O Tannenbaum’. They go back and forth for a while, until finally the two enemy camps sing ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ in Latin, together. ‘This was really the most extraordinary thing’, rifleman Graham Williams later recalled, ‘two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war.’

A Scottish regiment stationed just north of the Belgian town of Ploegsteert goes further still. From the enemy trenches, Corporal John Fergusen hears someone call out, asking if they want some tobacco. “Make for the light,’ shouts the German. So Fergusen heads out into no man’s land.

‘[We] were soon conversing as if we had known each other for years,’ he later wrote. ‘What a sight – little groups of Germans and British extending almost the length of our front! Our of the darkness we could hear laughter and see lighted matches […] Here we were laughing and chatting with men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill!’

The next morning, Christmas Day, the bravest of the soldiers again climbed out the trenches. Walking past barbed wire they go over to shake hands with the enemy. Then they beckon to those who’d stayed behind. ‘We all cheered,’ remembered Leslie Walkington of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles, ‘and then we flocked out like a football crowd.’

Gifts are exchanged. The British offer chocolate, tea and puddings; the Germans share cigars, sauerkraut and schnapps. They crack jokes and take group photographs as though it’s a big, happy reunion.

Other aspects of this story included the opposing sides played soccer games. They held a joint burial service mingling voices and accents to sing, “The Lord is my Shepherd/ Der Heir ist mein Hirt.” Soldiers began questioning the terrible things they’d been told about “the other” by their national media.

And here’s a beautiful point, the Christmas truce of 1914 was not an isolated case. Bregman notes similar things happened during the Spanish Civil War and the Boer Wars, as well as the American Civil War, the Crimean War and the Napoleonic Wars.

In this Christmas time I affirm such outbreaks of peace in how we treat fellow human beings, all beings, and this planet we are lucky enough to call home. That’s truly all I want for Christmas.

Merry Christmas and Happy Yule each and every one of you!

P.S. There’s some really juicy and fun stuff around reindeer and magic mushrooms I just learned about and I’ll share in a follow up post.

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