Pylimitics

This is the time of year we find ourselves in the “yule” or “yuletide” season. It’s twelve days long — except when it’s about two months long — which it isn’t when it lasts just three days. But we’re only “probably” in it because it hasn’t always taken place at this time of year, or even at only this time of year. It hasn’t always had anything to do with Christmas, either. That’s because it’s a great deal older than Christmas.

“Yule,” today’s word, comes from the Old English word “geól,” which was what they called Christmas. But the word is even older than Old English. It appears in Old Norse as “jól,” and it’s even older than that — before there was even Old German, it was the pre-Germanic word “*jeqwl.” I don’t know what those symbols say about how it’s supposed to be pronounced — and for that matter, I’m not even all that clear about how we know how a word that old should be pronounced. But in any case, the word goes way, way back.

The first time Christmas was ever mentioned was in Rome, around the year 70 CE. It took some unspecified amount of time for both Christianity and Christmas to reach northern Europe, of course, and when it did there was already a handy holiday waiting: Yule.

The oldest written mention of “yule” in anything resembling English comes from The Venerable Bede in 726. I’m not going to quote it because most of us can’t read it; it’s only “English” (as we understand it) in a loose sense. The festival itself was a celebration of harvest, and used to be in November. The Gothic ancestor of “yule” is “jiuleis,” which is part of what “November” was called (that’s from the period when Yule lasted a couple of months). 

Yule began to be associated with Christmas around the year 900 or so, but it didn’t really get popular until about four centuries later. It appears in the epic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, from about 1390: “I craue..a crystemas gomen, For hit is ȝol & nwe ȝer.” 

As you can see from that quote, Yule was not exactly the same as Christmas; it just happened at about the same time of year. The holidays only happened at the same time of year because of the outcome of a big debate in Rome that had taken place more than a millennium earlier, around the 200s. They were trying to decide when to celebrate Christmas, and they were arguing about placing it on May 20, April 18 or 19, March 25, January 2, November 17, November 20, or December 25. December 25 won out because the argument took place in Rome, where December 25 (at least according to that version of the Roman calendar) was the winter solstice, so it was the most symbolic date of the lot.

As an interesting side note, about 6 centuries later, Isaac Newton, knowing nothing about the big debate that had taken place, figured out that Christmas had been placed on December 25 just for that reason; to take place on the solstice. By that time the solstice had drifted a bit from that date (it’s now the 21st), but being Newton, he probably figured that out too. 

Quite a few of the traditions around Christmas celebrations even today come from older Yule traditions — in Scandinavia, where we would say “Merry Christmas,” they still use “God Jul,” which by now means the same thing. The traditional Christmas fire in the fireplace on Christmas comes from the “Yule Log,” which was a really big chunk of wood. It was theoretically big enough keep burning for all 12 days (note we’re talking about the 12-day-Yule era now), although I don’t know how realistic that was. And they had to save a portion of it too, because each year’s log was traditionally lit using a piece of the previous one. 

There are a bunch of other traditions, from mistletoe to serving a holiday drink (punch or egg nog or grog) in a bowl. And in Scotland they served (possibly still do) “Yule brose” in a bowl. It’s a kind of dinnertime oatmeal, sort of an oatmeal stew with meat (which sounds just as appetizing as most ancient recipes). Sometimes it contained a ring, and whoever got the ring (and didn’t accidentally swallow it) was predicted to be the first one to get married in the coming year. 

For a while, by the way, there used to be two Yules every year. The other one was “Lammas Yule,” or the “Yule of August.” It’s an old Anglo-Saxon holiday that was also a harvest festival held at a more sensible time, when you just finished harvesting your wheat. It was shorter — usually just “Lammas day” or “Lammas night.” The “Auld Lammas Fair” is still held in Northern Ireland at the start of the last week of August. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet was born on Lammas Eve, which is considered symbolic. The Anglo Saxons made “lammas bread”, which was made out of the just-harvested wheat, and was thought to have magical powers. They would put a piece in each corner of the barn where the rest of their wheat was stored, and it was supposed to protect the wheat. I’m sure the British Isles mice agreed that marking the wheat with some nice bread was an excellent idea.