It’s coming on Christmas/
Cutting down trees/Putting up reindeer/
Singing songs of Joy and Peace/
- River by James Taylor
I’m sitting here listening to James Taylor’s Album Christmas to a song called River.
I love the first few lines I have posted here for y’all. I am trying to get in the Christmas / Yule
Tide spirit. I thought I would tell
y’all a few stories of Christmas past, and as always we will start with Oma.
Oma made the holidays joyful, with a huge tree covered in
lights, lights on the house, and a plastic Santa complete with Reindeer
outside. What I remember about her most
was Christmas at her house. The whole
family would gather. My uncle and his
family would drive in from Houston, and the rest of us would come in from our
local towns and communities. There was
often a well timed phone call from Germany calling to wish us well. With a seven hour time difference they would
have already had Christmas and be heading to bed at that point. With that call and all of us there, it would
seem as if we were not so far apart, for one night we were this big loving
family, even if there was an ocean between us.
I think Christmas was when we expressed most of our German
culture and traditions. A week or so
before Christmas a large metal box would arrive from Germany sent by Oma’s
brother, from a company in Nurnberg. It
was filled with all kinds of candies, cookies, and breads. For us it was Christmas Eve that was most
important. That’s the night we opened
presents. There were lots of presents,
but nothing extravagant. Angie and I
often got matching gifts. One year we
got these huge life size dolls that Angie’s mom had made for us. Angie’s looked like her’s, with blond hair
and blue eyes. Mine looked like me with
brown hair and brown eyes. We both got
typewriters that year. That was Oma’s
last gift to us. We were 6.
In our area of Germany they did not do stockings. The custom was to do Weinachtstellers, or
Christmas Plates. They were these thick paper
plates with Christmas images on them, and fluted edges. They were filled with nuts, an apple and an
orange (luxuries during winter, not that many generations ago), a good
chocolate bar, cookies, gold chocolate coins (for wealth), Marzipan, a few candies and
sometimes a small gift. My last plate
from Oma had a lip gloss dressed up as a dolly, on a string. Everyone had their own plate, per their own
tastes. I have a wonderful photo of
those last plates she made sitting on a table in her house. Christmas at her house was always warm and
loving.
We kids had our own table, where the appetizers were, I
always ate heavily from the relish tray.
The relish tray for those of you, who are not from the South, had black
and green olives, and several types of pickles on it. We kids would all get excited and run to open
the presents, or try to eat from our Christmas Plates, have to be corralled
back, told that no, we had to eat our dinner first, and then we could open
presents and have our plates. Only after
dinner, desert, and finally when they were almost done with Coffee and/ or
starting on the Schnapps would we be allowed to open them. Oh waiting was such agony! That joy and wonder of the season, that since
of family and connection, across towns, states, and continents, when Oma died
it all went away. As far as I remember,
after her death, we never gathered as a family again to have Christmas
Eve. Oma’s brother kept sending the
metal boxes from Nurnberg, until his death, but it was never the same.
Christmas at Novelle’s, Daddy’s Mom, was different. There were no plates, no calls from
Germany. I have this great memory of us
going to hunt for a tree for Novelle.
You didn’t go buy a tree back in those days. We drove down the road, until we saw some
trees we liked, and then got out of the truck with an ax and just cut one
down.
We were out doing this one Christmas, and Daddy had been
chopping on this tree for a bit, and this man walks up to us. He was dressed all in hunter orange, gun over
his arm, and I think carrying some birds.
He stopped to speak to us and my Daddy got real nervous like, and the
man says to us, “This your land?” Daddy
says, “No sir.” God I knew were in so
much trouble, when he said it like that, and the man says, “Mine neither,” and
then he just walked right past us. It
never occurred to me, until much later in my life, that we were not supposed to
be on, whoever’s property we were, and damn sure not stealing their tree. I think Daddy chopped down a little scrub
pine, could not have been more than 4 feet tall. We brought the tree back to Novelle’s, stuck
it in a coffee can full of dirt, put some paper chains on it and called it a
Christmas Tree.
Mom and I have continued with the tradition of Christmas Plates
and talking on the phone to the family in Germany on or around Christmas. Calls to German, for most of my life, were
just too expensive to do any time you wanted, so you had to save it for
something special. Now we have Facebook
and can talk to them anytime we want!
Yeh for technology!
I went looking for the origins of the Christmas Plate early
on in my Pagan path. I found that it
comes from the tradition where a bowl of milk would be left out on Christmas Eve
as an offering, and if it was accepted the next morning, it would be filled
with nuts and gifts. I believe, although
I cannot think of the reference at the moment, that the milk was left out for
Odin and the Wild hunt, which includes Holda.
Milk is a traditional offering left for her, since she is related to
children and domestic animals like goats and cows. That makes sense to me. Offerings for Odin and the animals that
pulled his chariot could also be left in the bowl instead of milk, things like
hay and carrots.
In my family traditions the Christmas Tree does not come
down until the New Year. Oma refused to
wash clothes between Christmas and New Years.
She believed it would bring bad luck.
She was big on luck. She loved
shamrocks and had lots of superstitions, like no shoes and no hats on the table
or bed. She loved shamrocks so much that
she took Good Luck Bear, the green Care Bear with a shamrock on his stomach, as
her personal totem, when she got cancer.
He went with Oma everywhere. I
think we even buried her with it. On his
stomach Oma wrote her personal mantra, “I can, I will, I must.”
It took me a while to track down the origins of leaving the
tree up and not washing clothes. Oma was
unknowingly passing down to us, old traditions of Yule. The Christmas Tree was left up from Christmas
to Epiphany, which covers the 12 days of Yule, a holy time for our ancestors, a
time out of time. House work was
traditionally not to be done during this time of year, cause you cleaned like a
mad woman right before it. You were to
take these days off and not clean house, or wash clothes. The old saying is that, “no wheel, should
turn during Yule.”
I have, since I became Pagan, tried to keep the 12 days of
Yule, which starts on Mother’s Night the night before Winter Solstice and goes until
New Years Day. I used to clean like a
mad woman starting about Halloween and going right up until Mother’s Night,
until Jay told me he didn’t like that, cause it just about drove me crazy. The old belief is that when the Wild Hunt
pass over your house during Yule, and finds it neat and tidy that Mother Holda
will bless you. I hoped each year that
she would bless us with a human child, but that didn’t happen. So the crazy cleaning has fallen by the
wayside, but I am still anxious to get up and clean the top of my kitchen
cabinets before Yule starts. But Jay
will have to help me with that, so we will see.
For the last, oh so many years, I have made sugar cookies
for Christmas. I always try to leave
Mother Holda an offering of these cookies and milk on Mother’s night. The next morning I remove the milk and pour
it in her well, a sacred spot, in my little grove area, where my outside altar
is. I split the cookies between our fur
children (7 dogs,3 goats and pig).
I hate the commercialism of Christmas / Yule Tide. Some of my Christian brothers and sisters get
it right. I feel most Americans today
are missing the entire point of Christmas.
Excluding Christmas in July, in this country we start putting out Christmas
stuff just as soon as the Halloween stuff is sold out. Christmas commercials start before
Thanksgiving, which has gone from a major holiday into a minor one. I like my holidays one at a time, Halloween,
Thanksgiving and then Christmas / Yule Tide.
We can’t even give thanks in this country for all we have,
without being bombarded with what almost seems like the foreplay of
Christmas. This ecstatic rush of
presents, and lights, and parties, and charging up one’s credit cards to keep
up with the Jones, and so that no one in the family might for a moment, be
denied the smallest things they want.
People fight each other over dolls and rolls of wrapping paper, that
will all at some point be thrown away.
It all finally culminates in Christmas Eve / Morning with the ripping
open of presents, and beleaguered now broke parents. These happy children who have no value of a
dollar, who as adults will be dismayed when they finally learn, they can’t have
everything they want. When the kids go
to their room and the parents are left to clean up all the mess, they are as
exhausted as if they have just had a long loving session. And in a way they have. They have been fucked by this idea of crash commercialism
that we are feed as Americans. Buy more and
you will be happy! It’s all about making
the kids happy! X marks the spot, sorry
darling, but that’s not it.
Long before the myth of Santa, or of the Wiseman giving
gifts to the Christ child, or of Odin and Holda in the Wild Hunt, it was about
Winter. We forget in our cushy lives of
AC / Heat and ready available food supplies, that winter used to be the time
when lots of people died, those most vulnerable among us, the young, and the
old. Presents were given at Winter
Solstice, the start of winter, so one might SURVIVE to see the next spring. Gifts were practical, warm clothes, good portions
of food, blankets and furs to keep warm with.
Anything that might help that person you loved, get to the Spring. Neighbors helping neighbors, family helping family,
friends helping friends, no hospitality was to be refused even to one’s enemies
during winter. The most valuable
resource we have, is each other, both now and then.
Parties were held in the north lands on Mother’s night to
honor the mothers in our lives, both alive and long dead. To honor the gift of life, and the sacrifices
they made for us to be here. I think of
those Viking Mother’s often, in the dark, by a smoky fire, never quite warm,
and never with quite a full stomach.
Spinning, knitting, weaving, a gift to keep a brother, a husband, or a
daughter warm and to make it through to the warmth of Spring. The mother’s worried then, if she could
ration out the food they had stored up long enough, to get them to the first
harvest, and to when the chickens would again lay eggs, and they would have
fresh protein for their children and themselves. During Yule the family would come to visit
and gifts would be exchanged, it would be one of the last times they would see
their families before Spring, because soon the snow would be so thick, that
traveling would be almost impossible.
So as you are maxing out your credit cards this year,
standing in line at Wal-Mart reading this on your smart phone, I urge you to
think, “Will this gift help the person I love get safely to the Spring?” Maybe put back the Xbox that you can’t afford,
and get them some fuzzy socks and a good book instead. I’m just saying.
Last year Juno told me that she had never really had a
Christmas, that her family had always been too poor. So Jay and I gave her and Kay one. Many poor kids grow up thinking that Santa
doesn’t love them, or that they were not good enough to be given gifts at
Christmas. I hate that. I hate that in this culture, some poor kids
believe that no matter how good they are, they will not be rewarded by
presents, because that is what our culture teaches them. If you are good Santa will come, and give you
these lavish gifts. Maybe if we didn’t buy
into all of this, and got back to what the root of what each of our holidays
are, no matter your tradition, it might be better for all of us. Me, I’m hoping for functionality and
practicality this year, I am hoping for fuzzy socks.
Blessed Yule to all of you.
Ilsa
Many thanks to my Heathen Brother Rob who proofed this for
me.
http://urglaawe.org/Englisch.html
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