The Irreverent and Unconventional Guide to Holiday Tunes

Tags

Christmas, music, yule

As a Pagan, I have a confession to make…

I love Christmas.

Ferreals.

I love it. I love the trees, the decorations, the lights, eggnog–I even love fruitcake.  Sure, we have Yule/Solstice (Happy Belated, BTW, either way you celebrate it), but it’s still weird to celebrate a what amounts to a major cultural holiday on the wrong day (even if much of the iconology we associate with Christmas has its start in pre-Christian traditions)…  It’s a bit like being the only person celebrating the 4th of July on the 1st of July.

But the thing I love the most of all is the music.  I think it because I associate it with one of the most treasured traditions of my childhood…  You see, I come from a musical family upbringing (unfortunately, I’m the least musical of them all), and every Christmas of my childhood included a rousing hour or so of various relatives pounding out tunes from yellowing pages of sheet music (I am, however, an excellent page turner) and taped together books of Christmas music on the piano..or whatever other instruments they had brought along (including the good ole voice box).

Unfortunately, the Winter Solstice just doesn’t have that many singable carols…

Yes, we have music (a huge improvement from my early days as a Pagan).  As much as it makes me smile when I hear it on the rare occasion its played radio, Jethro Tull’s Solstice Bells does eventually get tiresome on the 347th replay for the season.  And sure, there’s the ever-popular Santa Claus is Pagan Too, by Emerald Rose and The Christians and the Pagans by Dar Williams and Bring Back the Light by Gypsy, or there’s Inkubus Sukkubus’s Hail the Holly King and Solstice Evergreen by Spiral Dance and Lisa Thiel’s Winter Solstice Song…but (with the exception of Santa Claus is Pagan Too), they just don’t have the same je ne sais quois as a rousing round of Jingle Bells.  Nor do many of them possess the solemn beauty of Silent Night, though there are some lovely mostly songs  the Solstice–like this piano solo on Michele McLaughlin’s Christmas album or this demo by Peter Gundry, or Tori Amos’s Winter’s Carol:

Or, perhaps familiarity is partially to blame; after all, Oh Holy Night, which is one of my favorite Christmas AND Yule tunes, only requires a slight bit of rephrasing to celebrate the night of the Sun’s rebirth instead of the night of Christ was born.  There’s this rather lovely rendition of What night is this? and about a dozen different Silent Nights (none of which I like).  None of this, however, solves the problem of what to do with holiday music once Yule is over and everyone else is still gearing up for Christmas.

So, here’s a few songs that celebrate the holiday season (all the holidays) with honesty and a jaunty tune…in no particular order of irreverence or unconventionality:

 

And, my personal favorite…

 

So, whatever your faith may be, and with all sincerity “I bid you pleasure and I bid you cheer | From a heathen and a pagan | On the side of the rebel Jesus.”

May your day be merry, whether you are celebrating Christmas tomorrow or not.

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Stories for the Season

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Christmas, Hanukkah, holiday, holiday stories, interfaith, yule

And praise to the sun, whose light sparks all life.

from A Return of the Light by Carolyn Edwards

We have been careful to fill our children’s lives and heads with stories.  We have not cared so much about the accuracy of said stories, so much as the message.  In general, some of them may be true, while others tell a greater truth than literalism could ever hope to reflect–sometimes, the greatest truths are not really true at all.  Because we often discuss the nature of truth and stories and how something doesn’t need to be “real” to be “important”, and that “belief” does not make something “real” I have never really worried about the slippery nature of truth.  For a four year old, Chickadee has shown herself to be quite wise on the subject…and Sharkbait doesn’t really care yet, as long as its a good story.  Like the sorts of stories that we ensure that our children read and hear and watch, the collective mythology of the modern winter holiday season spans the length and breadth of human history.  As parents, we have done our best to embrace as many of those stories that embrace the spirit of hope and joy, of charity and blessing, of new beginnings and a returning of the light as possible.  So our stories for the season are a mix of traditional and modern, of Christian and Jewish and Pagan and “none of the above”.

At times the song is very soft, and scarcely can be heard above the din and clatter of our lives. But when Yule comes, it rises and it swells in memory of that night when the Sun heard, and light and life were spared.

And so do we, upon this longest night, gather with those we love and who love us, and stand upon the body of slumbering Earth, and light the log with last year’s coal, and lift our voices soaring to the Sun, and join the song that first was sung so very long ago.

We sing our thanks to those who went before, and sing our fondest wish to those who come behind. We bask in the returning light of reawakened hope, and welcome Yule.

from The First Song: A tale of how Yule got its name, by Andras Corban Arthen, © 1994, The EarthSpirit Community (on This Winters Night by MotherTongue)

We have used these stories to create our own traditions.  Traditions that will teach our children not only our own beliefs, but about the beliefs of others.  Traditions that will fill the silence they would hear otherwise.  I was recently reminded in a post from a blogger I follow that being raised without hatred for something doesn’t equal being raised to have tolerance for it.  As she said in one of the most powerful lessons I think a parent can learn and teach, “When you leave a void like that, someone or something will eventually fill it in.” So, tonight we talked about Hanukkah, we told the story of Tante Golda and The Miracle of Potato Latkes, and we ate some potato latkes . And on Christmas Eve, Chickadee will be taking part in our UU congregation’s traditional Christmas pageant this year as the nativity’s drummer girl (we thought about letting Sharkbait be a lamb, but he’s not terribly good at staying in one spot for an extended period of time).  This week we will read both Twas the Night Before Christmas and Twas the Night Before Yule for our bedtime stories.  At the Solstice, we will have our yearly family Yule ritual and afterwards we will do our reading of Chickadee’s favorite story of the Yule Fairies and the Baby Sun King (Daddy plays the part of Brown Knobby).

The goal is that hopefully our children will not only celebrate their own faith, but that they will develop a respect for the beauty of the stories of other faith traditions as well.  And that one day, when they are confronted by the terrible ugliness that exists in how some individuals choose to interpret express those traditions, that beauty will have taken root and filled the void where silence would have done a disservice.

Some Pagan and Pagan-ish Books and Stories for the Season:
The Winter Solstice: The Sacred Traditions of Christmas by John Matthews*
Pagan Christmas: The Plants, Spirits and Rituals at the Origins of Yuletide by Christian Ratsch*
Yule: A Celebration of Light and Warmth by Dorothy Morrison*
The Return of the Light: Twelve Tales from Around the World for the Winter Solstice by Carolyn Edwards
The Shortest Day: Celebrating the Winter Solstice by Wendy Pfeffer
The Winter Solstice by Ellen Jackson
A Children’s Yule Story @ PaganDad
*indicates that the book is geared towards adults

Trimming the Tree

Tags

Christmas, crafts, garland, ornaments, salt dough, winter solstice, yule

Growing up, the Christmas tree went up the day after Thanksgiving (no Black Friday shopping for us!) and usually came down the weekend after the New Years–both were all day affairs.  Our tree was huge and fake (mom had allergies), and a complicated puzzle of color coded branches that all had to be unboxed, fluffed just-so and maneuvered into place.  There are pros and cons to the type of tree one chooses, but due to allergies (mine and Sharkbait’s) and apartment-living (some apartments ban real trees), we too use the artificial tree (I did find that “six year lifespan” of an artificial tree mentioned in the above link to be a bit suspect–I’m pretty sure my mom still uses the tree from my childhood, which she got when my parents divorced, and is probably older than I am).  Every set of branches had its own set of lights, and boxes of ornaments, each with their own story, came up from the basement until the tree was laden with ribbons and lights and bits of this and that, and underneath went the hand-painted nativity scene made by my grandfather.  And in the background, music–from contemporary to classical played while (usually) a fire crackled in the fireplace.

Unlike my childhood, we celebrate the Solstice rather than the Nativity and we don’t have those boxes of carefully wrapped, passed down ornaments (though we have a few), mostly due to our semi-nomadic, apartment dwelling lifestyle.  Having been in the military and making two cross country moves  has been quite helpful for minimizing attachment to *stuff*, which has lead us to look for creative and cheaper DIY alternatives…which happen to be fun and unique as well.

DIY Ornament Ideas:

• Dried Fruit Ornaments–Citrus and apple slices (sprinkle with a bit of lemon juice to prevent browining) oven/air/dehydrator dried make great ornaments, and you can add in all spice or cinnamon sticks.
• Nature Stuff Ornaments–Pine cones, holly sprigs, sea shells, fall leaves, dried flowers (late summer/early fall rose petals, strung and dried on thread makes wonderful garland), etc.
• Garlands–This year we made paper chains (Chickadee made ours, from a grand total of 4 pieces of paper) and popcorn and cranberry garland (both kids helped make the mess, and ate the left overs).  Though, for future reference, I’ve spotted some awesome crochet garlands (there are several popcorn and cranberry garland patterns out there that I’m planning to try for next year), felted garlands and fleece garland, which seem like a great use of our fabric scraps..
• Salt Dough Ornaments–Adding extra flour, ground spices (nutmeg, cinnamon, etc), we made bake-able play dough and cut it out with cookie cutters, air dried and baked them.
• Shopping-bag Snowballs–Accordion fold  several shopping bags and wrap them around your hand in a loop.  Tie off as tightly as possible on one end of the circle and then cut on the other end, ruffle out the folds and trim into a fluffy ball-shape.  Recycle at the end of the holiday (a few of these put together with some duct tape make awesome dress-up pom poms for the kids).
• Origami Ornaments–A friend of ours that happens to be handy at origami has been kind enough to volunteer his serviced, using paper the kids have colored on cut square he’s been making us dinosaurs to hang on the tree.  I stink at following anything but the most simple origami directions, but I know from printing them out for him to follow, they are readily Googled in just about any shape you can think of.
• Rag Bag Ornaments–Using cloth scraps, I made two different types of ornaments, mini-quilted “bags” stuffed with cloth scraps and herbs and birds out of layered and frayed cloth (the bird in the pic hasn’t been frayed yet)…but pretty much anything you can think of you can make!
• Yarn Ornaments–We have two types of yarn ornaments, pom poms and yarn doll fairies (a mini yarn doll with wings), though there are plenty of crochet and knit ornament patterns available online for free as well.