Weekend Journaling Prompt: Imagining Yule

How will you approach the turn of the year?

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On Saturday night, I sat with some friends and we found ourselves talking about our forthcoming Christmases. We all had different plans for different phases of life. One of us was trying to work out how to manage Christmas for a mother-in-law with dementia; another was travelling to support a sibling in crisis; both of my friends were facing Christmas without any of their own parents still alive. For my own part, I was preparing to travel out to Spain to spend Christmas with my maternal family, all of whom have moved there. Christmas got complicated long ago.

What interested me was that, during our twenties, we had all tried to dismantle Christmas altogether. Trying to manage grief or conflict, each of us had preferred to pretend that it wasn’t happening at all. The phrase “just another day in the year” had fallen from our tongues. There were a few years when I refused to put up decorations; a colleague became so exasperated with me that she took me to a store and made me buy a Christmas tree. She could not believe that anyone could abandon this celebration so completely, and in retrospect, I think she was right. After a few desolate Christmases, I began to reinvent my own.

Perhaps when we’re still young, we need to somehow defeat the old celebrations that we’ve been handed down, and reinvent them for our own age. That’s what seemed to have happened for all of us, somewhere along the way. We kill off the family traditions that seemed so heavy as we were growing up, and then they surprise us by coming back for us, shadows of their former selves, ready to be taken back into our homes.

I’m talking about Christmas here because the three of us grew up culturally Christian (although in my case, Christmas was an entirely secular affair). But I think it applies to other feasts too, other cultural celebrations. At some point in our lives, they begin to stifle us, and we have to pull them apart and let them regrow in an old-new way. They might become smaller or bigger; they might involve new rituals, or the jettisoning of rituals that always felt oppressive. They might be simplified, or become more joyfully elaborate. We take traditions and mould them to suit our taste. Future generations will do the same with whatever we hand to them.

For me, it’s been helpful to think about the long solstice instead of Christmas per se; to see Christmas Day as just one day in a longer sequence, which takes the pressure off and draws me back into the natural world. This has a greater connection to Yule, the Northern European midwinter festivity that lasted several days. And now, with just a few weeks to go until we reach the darkest day, I think it’s a good moment to look towards that time, and to think about how we will approach it this year.

In today’s prompt, I’m inviting you to plan for your own, unique take on the turning of the year. (It’s a bumper edition - you might want to spread this one over a few weeks!)