Today, Some Celebrate Day of the Long Night

Christmas isn’t the only holiday left on the calendar--today is a very important day of celebration because of two things: day and night. Today is the winter solstice, the year’s darkest day and its longest night.

Pagans (of whom Wiccans are probably the most prominent group in America), Druids (derived from Celtic traditions) and others who belong to Earth-based religions will celebrate the solstice as a high holiday called Yule. (The freshly cut yule log is originally a Druidic practice distilled from Norse and Teutonic customs, a wintry counterpart to summertime bonfire celebrations.)

“Yule is really a Norse holiday,” says Liz Guerra, president of the Connecticut Wicca and Pagan Network. “There’s certain things Wiccans do during the holidays, while pagan religions are less structured. Depending on what kind of pagan you are, you will celebrate in different ways: You could be Native American, Egyptian or Celtic, and you would do different things to celebrate, though a lot of people tend to follow their ancestral roots.”

Following old fertility myths, Dec. 20 to 23 (the solstice falls on different days according to Earth’s rotation) included a day of celebration in ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece. Almost all ancient cultures celebrated it as a turning point in the year; it is no accident, for example, that Christmas falls near the Roman holiday of Saturnalia. Early Christians did not know the exact date of Jesus’ birth, so a compromise was achieved through the borrowing of a festival date from the pagan year, mostly to offer converts a more familiar calendar of worship.

The CWPN will celebrate the solstice with its Yule Celebration in Woodbury, Conn., Guerra says.

“What we do is start off by cleansing the area,” she says, “creating sacred space and casting a circle, an invisible sphere of protective energy. Then we asperge the circle using consecrated salt and water. We invoke the four elements (fire, water, earth and air) the four corners (east, west, north and south), and invite those energies into the circle. We believe in balance: In whatever we invoke, we invoke the balance.... After we invoke the elements, we invoke the deity--the goddess energy and the god. The name of the deity depends on who is doing the invoking, on what pantheon they pray to. We usually keep it general for a public Sabbat, so people can fill in the blank.”

According to Corey Burke, a graphic designer and member of the CWPN who has been practicing for 12 years, the Wiccan celebration of Yule is linked to Earth and its cycle of birth and rebirth.

“Eight times a year we celebrate the changing of the season,” Burke says. “This holiday marks the changing from the darkest time of the year to the rebirth of the sun.... Wiccans believe that this is the day that the sun is born. Comparably, you can say that in Christianity this is when the god is being born. In Wicca you celebrate the coming of the sun--coming near to the end of the winter--which in the old days would mean less harsh times.”

“It [Wicca] is an outcropping of an agrarian society,” Burke says, “when all you had was taking care of the crops, and you went to bed at dusk. We have embraced the earth; it means going back to the old ways of doing things.... Thus it is meant to reinforce our connection with the cycle of the earth and the seasons.... Wicca is an everyday thing, though. I make many of my personal choices on the standard that almost every religion has: the idea of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Whatever you do will come back to you.... If you give out happiness, you will get happiness in return.”

Pagans, a more general descriptive term for practitioners of Earth-based religions, believe in a multi-deity system; Wiccans celebrate and believe specifically in a balance with a goddess and a god (although from diverse mythologies), Burke says.

Pagan celebrations are also inflected by national/cultural traditions. Alicia Folberth, president of Pagan Community Church in Bridgeport, Conn., has organized her church’s celebration this year as a Norse festival, derived from Scandinavian, Teutonic and Germanic traditions.

“We don’t do a celebration where one person gets up and speaks to the crowd,” she says. “There’s drumming, singing; one of my folk will be singing ‘O Tannenbaum’ in German. It lasts about an hour and a half. It’s potluck; we’re asking for a nonperishable food item that we will donate. We’ll be doing some singing, but we usually have a drumming circle, so people should bring their drums.”

Folberth also points out the pagan origins of many Christian traditions. “The Christmas tree is a pagan custom,” Folberth says. “Holly and mistletoe are sacred to the Druids. All of these derive from older religions. The Christians gave the days new names, but they didn’t change the customs--all of us are celebrating a rebirth, a rebirth of the light. Each culture has its own mythology, its own religion. There is a lot of overlap.”

One of the more distinct solstice celebrations is a labyrinth walk.

The labyrinth is a common symbol across the world--most medieval churches, for example, had a labyrinth either inside the church or just outside, allowing people to walk the labyrinth and meditate. Labyrinth walks usually take place on the solstices and equinoxes as well as New Year’s Eve.

The labyrinth walk itself is thus less New Age than ancient, a misconceived notion Helen Curry, president of the Labyrinth Project, would like to dispel. Though there is a blessing ceremony at the beginning of the celebration, Curry sees the labyrinth more as “a metaphor for life, for one’s day-to-day journey.”

Folberth, Burke and Guerra are eager to correct misconceptions regarding their faiths and celebrations. Many still believe that pagans are Satanists or, at least, outside the putative religious norm.

“I think there is largely a misunderstanding of Wicca and pagans,” Folberth says. “The media have brought out a good bit as far as exposing things apart from what is perceived.” Guerra agrees.

“If you look at all the traditions of Christmas, they’re based on pagan rituals,” Guerra says. “It’s unfortunate that narrow-minded people are celebrating Christmas with pagan traditions and yet have a total misconception about pagans, Wiccans and what have you.”

“Wicca and Satanism have nothing to do with each other,” Burke says. “If you look back in history, the pentacle [star within a circle, now often considered a symbol of Satanism], that symbol was a symbol of protection; people out West would paint that large symbol on barns to protect their livestock.”

But for Curry and her seasonal celebration, the winter solstice is really about the cycle of light and dark--not necessarily about a religious holiday.

“In our culture, we don’t spend much time honoring the darkness,” she says. “It’s an equal part of our world, you need the darkness to have the light.... Darkness in and of itself has no intrinsic good or evil connected to it, nor does light; it’s simply darkness. And so, of course, at winter solstice we are at the darkest point of the year, and you begin to move back into the light.”

David Podgurski writes for the Stamford Advocate, a Tribune company.