I’ve figured out the mess that is christmas, because unless you’re a practicing christian why would you do it? It’s because the people who added the religion to the season know how to sales pitch a product. They have confused you.
People in the southern hemisphere need a reminder of deep roots within the blood and sinew, bone and guts, that are deeply, if not consciously, remembered. It’s an ancestral problem. Most have merely forgotten. The Celts, the Saxons, the Norse, the Normans, the Lombardian and Tuscan, the Scythians, the Sami, and so many others within you, remembers. That the pine and fir are perennial, of all the European trees.
You did not cut it down in the long dark. You decorated it with holly. You honored the oak dreaming. And the mistletoe song.
You have already rendered down the last of the stag fat, and your cattle are now indoors until Imbolg. You have already made the candles that will illuminate your houses through the potential season of death. One in each village window to light the shadows. A fire in the snow. Music, feasting. Wearing finely tanned fur and gold and amber talismans. With family and friends. Probably from every village in a hundred miles. Atop that hillside. It’s our culture; our heritage. And we love sharing it with other cultures, which is very cool.
And I also understand the goose on a 33-degree day in Australia (won’t say turkey, that’s way too culturally messy). I get it. If the consumerist model, all that wasted wrapping and anything at all plastic, were removed from the equation I’d REALLY get it. I would even decorate a tree unless it was cut down vicariously and not used for fuel for the remainder of the dark days.
Santa? That just creeps me out beyond anything acceptable when you think about it. Who would allow an old obese man, a stranger, into their children’s bedroom unsupervised in the middle of the night?
When you and your family celebrate the 25th of December you are actually celebrating midwinter. The last of the fare that could not be preserved, the animals that won’t make it through the peat-blackened season of snow, frost, sleet, deep, deep dark lit only by candles of tallow and rendered fat, the season of remembering the stories of secrets and the folk tales of woodland creatures transforming and shapeshifting to communicate with us as kin. And sharing of the roundhouse or the longhouse until the thaw allows for travel and visiting. Your animal, fowl and fodder cousins are all indoor with you, along with many small blood-sucking critters in your lavender, pine needle, straw or sweetgrass bedding, that will be burned in great pyres come spring.
You are isolated, unless you know Albion. Unless you understand which white is safe and which white is deadly.
Unless the druids bring the last news along the pass before it is buried beneath 15 foot of snow.
The weak will not survive the season of ice. The very old, the children with unformed lungs. The hunter after seals who never returns, the dreamer seeking sight from the fungi blooming beneath the protection of the pine. Many will be received by earth, perhaps only to be buried o strapped to high pole platforms for sky burial.
Before the season of sleet and perpetual grey our ancestors gather in deep time caves—Mother Earth—to learn the secrets of sight, the teachings of elders, for initiation into adulthood. These places of potency are called, by the pseudoscience of archaeology (a mandate for robbery and misappropriation, naming by way of Abrahamic constructs as graves, when there is no evidence of such) passage graves. He cromlechs, the dolmens, the stones of home at Skara Brae in what is known as Orkney in the Outer Hebrides—heart of the sea lanes for countless thousands of years or Carnac, first stop of the ships and caravanserai headed along the old Silk Road to China and India, Gåseborg in what is now called Sweden, along the coast where the storms lash all above ground, pulverizing and taking into the great deep as nourishment for the Kraken.
You see, we celebrate the Great Forgotten. Ancestral Celts, Saxons, Mongols, Sami—people of the reindeer my own ancestors amongst the many.
Who are you? Who are your ancestors? Do you know? Or don’t you care to belong to land and sea and the stories of pride and awe?
Those of you from Palestine and Jordan and Egypt and Canaan, we respect your customs but we are not you. Conversation can only be had, about matters such as this, with respect for differences.
As such it is advisable to also know the seasons of the First Nations of this land.
Instead of imposing the lie of some Christ Mass, when even the word Christ simply implies anointing. That word is reek, and while I honour the legacy of the ancestral Cycladic Cultures of the Minoan and Helladic eras, I am not them. The word is derived from khriein meaning‘to anoint’.
Greek word χριστός (chrīstós), meaning “anointed one”. The word is derived from the Greek verb χρίω (chrī́ō), meaning “to anoint.”. In the Greek Septuagint, χριστός was a semantic loan used to translate the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ (Mašíaḥ, messiah), meaning “[one who is] anointed”.
And for the sake of clarity it is important to mention that the word messiah is derived from the Egyptian messah: the fat of the crocodile (actually a monitor lizard) that was used to anoint a pharaoh to the status of a god.
So remember. Do not be fooled. There are many who call themselves pagan who sit around a cut pine branch, or worse, a plastic facsimile that will end up polluting the food chain for the coming 125 thousand years (the false estrogens in plastic have approximately the same lifespan as uranium) alongside every unnecessary plastic toy given to children in some perverse display of nostalgia, soon discarded along with the puppies and kittens.
These same pagan explain to me, defensively, “oh, it’s just a day to be with family and celebrate.” I ask what happened to the other 364 days of a calendric year. Their lips often form straight lines as they try intimidation to defend their fallibility.
I forgive them They don’t understand. They are pressured to do this by the public bling on every street, in every store and by an economy that would have them on their knees.
Know who you are. Take kindly to those of difference. Have honest stories to share.
Christmas is as bullshitty as halloween that is really sowen, also called samhain (years end) and easter (spring). Discuss?
For understanding of the seasons of the First Nation people, and the land erroneously titled Australia, please go to
Liberate with something akin to lore.