On a chilly December night in Sandy Spring, Md., dozens of people crammed into the Woodlawn Manor for a Victorian-era Yuletide dance lesson, the wood floors creaking under the uncertain steps of 21st-century people learning 19th-century English country dances.
"Every good party has dancing," said Angela Yau, a historical interpreter for the parks department who was teaching the dances — and the Victorians loved a good Yuletide shindig.
The merriment was emblematic of how many think of Yule; today, it's synonymous with Christmas. But centuries ago, before crooners sang about carols being sung by a fire, Yule meant something different: a pagan mid-winter festival around the solstice, dating back to pre-Christian Germanic people.
It was particularly important to Scandinavian communities during that time of year, beset by late sunrises and early sunsets, according to Maren Johnson, a professor of Nordic studies at Luther College.
"All these kinds of winter traditions are tied very intricately into small communities," she said. "You develop between yourselves a folklore about this winter time and this period of darkness."
In this week's installment of "Word of the Week," we travel back in time to the origins of Yule festivals, and trace those earliest traditions to modern-day Christmas celebrations.
Feasting, drinking and animal sacrifices
Scholars of these early pagan festivals don't have much concrete evidence of what actually went on at them, according to Old Norse translator Jackson Crawford, because much of the written record comes much later from Christians. But what is clear, he said, was that feasting and drinking were abundant.
Terry Gunnell, a professor of folkloristics at the University of Iceland, agrees. Drinking copious amounts of ale was not only encouraged but required, he said, and animals were slaughtered as part of the sacrifices to gods and spirits typical of these early festivals.
"The snow is coming down the mountains and in a sense, the nature spirits are moving closer," he said — and people wanted to appease them.
And then, there was the oath-swearing. Crawford said this was one of the major hallmarks of early Yule celebrations as recorded in myths like The Saga of Hervör and Heidrek from the 13th century. In it, a man swears to the king of Sweden that he'll marry his daughter with no real prospects of doing so.
"But your oaths during Yule are kind of sacred, extra binding," he said. "So he has to try to fulfill it," even though he eventually gets killed.
Crawford thinks that this oath-swearing could be where the word "Yule" actually comes from. The earliest roots could come from Indo-European words for "speaking," he said, and then Germanic peoples came to use it for more judicial purposes like admitting, confessing or swearing.
There's other theories out there, though, the dominant one being that the word could come from the Old Norse word hjól, meaning "wheel" — as in the "wheel of the year" that keeps turning with the seasons, Gunnell said.
Yule gets co-opted into Christmas
Christianization of this part of Europe, however, changed how people celebrated Yule. The church began to align its own holidays with pagan celebrations, Gunnell said. Easter replaced the festival at the beginning of summer, for example, and St. John's Day replaced midsummer. "And then we hear in Icelandic source material that [Yule] was replaced with Christmas," he said.
"So what the church is really doing is to allow people to go on doing what they had done before, but now under a Christian name," he added.
Around the 900s, Crawford said, Scandinavians started saying "Yule" and "Christmas" interchangeably.
"I think it suggests that, fundamentally, both of them are basically parties," he said.
That's not to say that Christmas was the exact same as the Yule celebrations of old. There was a new emphasis, Gunnell said, not so much on winter spirits but "a period of joy with the birth of Christ." But much of the feasting and drinking spirit of Yule stuck around — and became Christmas traditions throughout much of Europe.
Fast forward to the Victorian era, where the spirit of merriment became embedded in English culture, thanks to two important cultural influencers: Prince Albert, who imported traditional Yuletide customs popular in his native Germany, and Queen Victoria.
The queen fell in love with the traditions, Yau of the parks department said. And since she was a fashion icon, "These Christmas traditions really spread from the royal couple out through England and out through the colonies and everywhere else." And, as cultural customs are wont to do, the traditions morphed — creating, among other things, Santa Claus.
Still making sacrifices — just sweeter
Although slaughtering animals to please winter spirits is perhaps less typical of modern Yuletide celebrations, the spirit of sacrifice still remains, according to Gunnell.
That's particularly true in Scandinavian Christmas folklore. People leave out porridge for nisse and tomte, small trickster spirits who live in local forests, around the winter solstice in hopes of placating them or receiving gifts. (Though these days, Johnson said, many Scandinavians also celebrate the Julenisse, more of a Santa Claus figure.)
In Iceland, there's not really a Santa Claus figure at all, Gunnell said. Instead, there's the "Christmas Men," also known as the Yule lads. As the stories have told it, the mystic men – with names like "Window Peeper," "Sausage Swiper," "Bowl Licker" and "Meat Hook" — come one by one down from the mountains by your community, play pranks and steal things from homes. (To be fair to them, they'll also leave presents in windows for children.) On top of that, they have an ogress mother, Grýla, who eats misbehaving children "like sushi for Christmas," Gunnell said.
And although he doesn't swipe sausages or eat children, Santa Claus is not a completely dissimilar figure.
"The idea of sacrifices remains in leaving out a little bit of sherry or whiskey for Santa Claus and some food for the reindeer," Gunnell said.
It's something to consider the next time you leave out cookies and milk.
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