PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

“Well, maybe this is it,” I find myself thinking disconsolately: “the year without a Yule tree.”

It's my first time at an urban tree lot. Thoroughly disheartened, I wander the rows of overpriced green cones. Clearly, there's nothing here for me.

For years, we'd drive up North to the Fawn Lake tree farm. Twenty-three bucks and cut your own, no frills. Make your offering and take your pick.

But unshaven old Jake is retired now and so here I am, feeling like Charlie Brown. These trees have all been groomed to within an inch of their lives: perfect cones, Platonic ideals of “Yule tree”, branches so thick that I have to wonder: Where do you put the ornaments? Some have even—I can scarcely believe my eyes—been spray-painted green.

Not to mention the price. Ten bucks a foot, ye gods. $140 buys a lot of groceries.

Every year I remind myself: this is a choice. Every year I remind myself: it will still be Yule without it.

Every year I do it anyway. If this is what's on offer, though....

Then, out back by the dumpster, I finally find what I'm looking for.

One of the most frequent comments I hear about Minoan ceramics is how modern they look, how much they would be at home in any of our kitchens or dining rooms.

Most of us have an idea in our heads about what ancient pottery looks like. We've seen enough pictures of Greek and Roman cups, jars, and pots to know the vibe they have.

The ritual use of the sense of smell can include literally stopping to smell the roses. A pause on one's way, appreciating a flower, a whisper of "Hail Freya" as one sniffs, this is a ritual. Rituals do not have to be elaborate.

One can plant specific plants to honor particular god, or ancestor, or other being. If the nature of the plant includes fragrance, the smelling of the plant scent can be incorporated into ritual. I have a pink rose in my garden and when I smell it I honor Freya. Roses are usually Freya flowers but I also have one specific rose bush that is for Sigyn due to my personal experiences; see my "pranked by nature" post. 

“What's taters, precious, eh, what's taters?” asks Gollum.

“Po-ta-toes,” explains Sam. “The Gaffer's delight, and rare good ballast for an empty belly.”

(Along with tobacco, apparently—anachronistically—potatoes have somehow managed to make it over to Middle Earth from the Uttermost West. Go figure.)

They're in Ithilien, heading for Mordor along with Frodo and the Ring. Gollum has just snagged a couple of rabbits, which Sam is about to stew up with herbs. Herbs you can find in the wilderness; potatoes, alas, not so. His mention of the toothsome tubers was nostalgia, pure and simple.

(Maybe they'd come over with the men of Westernesse, after the fall of Númenor. After Gollum's time, anyway.)

Poor Gollum. Imagine: life without potatoes.

“There's something wrong with those trees,” I can remember thinking.

February in Jerusalem: the City of the Evening Star.

(Centuries of scuttlebutt notwithstanding, the name “Jerusalem” has nothing whatsoever to do with shalom, peace: really, how could it? The city was originally named for Shalém, the Canaanite god of the Evening Star.)

(Put that in your Abrahamic pipe and smoke it.)

I've gone up to the Rockefeller Museum to see their famous collection of Bronze Age Syro-Palestinian (“Canaanite”) art and artifacts. Clearly, an old olive grove stood here once: some tired, neglected old olive trees still linger frumpily around the edges of the parking lot.

There's something wrong with them all. Something is growing in them, something that you can't help but intuitively know shouldn't be there: balls of yellow-green leaves completely unlike the trees' own dusty-silver foliage.

Something intrusive, disturbing, eerie even, something that seems to shine with an uncanny light of its own.

It was the first time that I'd ever seen wild mistletoe.

I'm not sure who shot the white markhor, or when.

For 20 years, though, his head, with its splendid crown of corkscrew horns, horizontal like Khnum's, has hung over my fireplace, watching impassively over conversation and coven meeting alike.

(I found him at a local antiques mall on, of all days of the year, Midsummer's Eve. At our celebration later that night, I waxed enthusiastic about my new purchase to the group, to the utter mystification of a non-pagan guest. “Pagans have a thing about horned animals,” a coven-sib told him, by way of explanation.)

The Kalasha of the Hindu Kush, the last Indo-European-speaking people to have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity, hold this wild mountain caprid sacred to the peri, the mountain fairies or elves. To these goat-herding pagans, markhors are the “flocks of the peri,” just as Highland Scots refer to deer as “fairy cattle.”

(The Kalasha and the Gael are, of course, distant kin, sundered by some 4000 years. Just how old, one wonders, is this metaphor? And what does it say about us that we should expect the lifeways of Faerie to mirror our own?)

Really, he's the centerpiece of the room, the Goat, with a gaze that's hard to avoid.

Through the seasons, I deck him variously. At Samhain this year, I wound his horns with orange lights and hung them with black and orange ornaments.

Playfulness is one thing, disrespect another. I try to be careful about this, never crossing the boundary into mockery. He always lets me know when I've gone too far—anyone who's been around the Maypole a few times will know what I mean by this—and when he does, I always back off.

Somehow, the Old Ways always manage to come down to relationship.

After the Samhain stuff came down this year, the room seemed too dark—oh, our Northern winters!—so I rewrapped the horns in white LED lights with so strong a bluish cast to them that one feels cold just looking at them.

Something was still missing, though, so a few days ago I hung some faux icicles along the light-wound horns. Lights and ice: together, they perfected the look.

He wears them proudly, attitudinously. From Lord of the Sabbat, master of unholy revels, he has become the Snow Goat, lord of Winter.

Maybe, as we get closer to Yule, I'll cut some branches of holly from out front and make him a collar. Or would that seem to tame him too much? We'll see what himself has to say about it.

The Goat always gets the final say.

The first snow of the season is magical the way it transforms the world. Bare trees suddenly wear a soft white mantle that sparkles in the light. Empty gardens and city parks are transformed into an enchanted fairyland. As snow covers the ground new shapes seem to emerge — is that a gnome I see beside the bench?
     But this is just a prelude to the arrival of the Cailleach. In Scotland, she is Cailleach Bheur the crone goddess and personified spirit of winter who brings the snow and storms. She heralds the fierceness of the season, the howling winds and drifts of snow. Winter will turn from gentle to harsh, and yet, the deep-frozen landscape has a stark beauty all its own. 
     Call to the Cailleach and she will be there to guide you through the season. Listen for her voice in the wind. Her message of winter: Face into the storm, see what is coming, and know that you can hold your own against anything.
     When the snow falls and the wind rises, light a white candle in her honor. Close your eyes and feel the special magic that can be gained through winter’s lesson.