Canaan, N.Y. — Billions of years ago, when a whirling cloud of Earth’s constituent molecules coalesced into a tilted, rotating sphere, seasons appeared, and a short while after that, Antonio Vivaldi and the Farmer’s Almanac. Also the winter solstice, the turning point when days start getting longer and the foul spirit of seasonal affective disorder begins to wane. To modern pagans, the sacred day is known by the conveniently vague term Yule, which has come to encompass all of the winter holidays people care about, including New Year’s Eve. In other words, there has always been considerable overlap in the various festivities celebrating the new solar year.
For millennia, people in various cultures and civilizations have celebrated the winter solstice with rituals, feasts, and, in some jurisdictions, legally mandated binge drinking—all for the purpose of thanking their gods, goddesses, and lucky stars for the anticipated return of brighter days. The revelers’ extreme partying seemed to work, so they doubled down and never gave up the habit, even after Christianity had supplanted the pagan deities in much of Europe and the British Isles. In fact, 21st-century pagans consume more booze over the winter holidays than they ever did in the Middle Ages. The Business Research Company’s “Alcoholic Beverages Global Market Report” states that the liquor market exceeded $569 billion in 2023, representing what would be, to even the wealthiest monarchs of the Iron Age, an unfathomable sum of ethanol.
But the folks who pioneered Yuletide alcohol poisoning left precious little textual evidence of their existence, never mind any account of their religious practices. Almost all we know of, say, pre-Christian indigenous religion in Britain was written by the English Christians tasked with extinguishing it. That is like Billy Graham writing a biography of Hugh Hefner. So we depend on archeologists and Hollywood to give us scant but tantalizing clues about the most ancient pagan religious beliefs and practices.
Beginning around the fourth century, Christians started using the term “pagan” to label anyone not of their faith or of the Jewish faith. With this convenient trick of semantics, ecclesiastical authorities reduced the whole of ancient indigenous European culture to a single term that you may have noticed is merely a negation. It’s as if Christians of the Middle Ages wrote their history of the world on a piece of confetti.
The ancient pagan peoples of Europe are important to any discussion of the winter solstice, because they held extremely diverse polytheistic beliefs while agreeing on one thing: that swilling ale, boasting publicly, and ritually slaughtering swine was the surest way of attracting the attention of deities like Odin and Thor, to whom partygoers expressed gratitude for having avoided starvation, the blows of battle axes, and the predation of dragons.
In the 21st century, sun worship is more popular than ever, and not only among beach-going college students. That is why, throughout the world, over-served celebrants continue to engage in quite unexpected activities during the winter solstice, many of which involve neither animal sacrifice nor ritual intoxication.
You know about Stonehenge. You have heard of the Aztecs and their celestially inspired human sacrifices. You have witnessed the New Year’s Eve ritual in Times Square, the glowing, sacred sphere descending at the stroke of midnight to the cheers of millions. But I will bet you didn’t know about these five, quirky winter solstice rites:
- The Saturnalia festival — During this Roman celebration, held from December 17 to December 23, gambling and drunkenness were expressly permitted, masters provided table service for their slaves, and everyone exchanged gag gifts.
- Spanish Radish Sculptures — Artists carve elaborate scenes and figures out of radishes on the Night of the Radishes, celebrated in Spain near the winter solstice.
- Japanese yuzu bath — To keep demons and bad luck away on the solstice, the Japanese, in a ritual even zoo animals participate in, take a hot bath infused with an aromatic citrus fruit called yuzu.
- Peruvian fistfights — Peruvians observe the winter solstice by holding organized fistfights, which symbolize a fresh start for the new year.
- Korean red bean porridge — In Korea, good luck on the solstice is linked to danpatjuk, a red bean porridge that celebrants consume to keep evil spirits away, a capability of the musical fruit all school children are familiar with.
The new solar year matters to everyone from pagans to prelates, simply because sunshine, like oxygen and water, is essential to all of life, including subterranean and nocturnal creatures. When the sun waxes or wanes, everyone feels it.
The return of longer days after December 21 is such a big deal that we really ought to make a holiday of it.
