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Och, is my sleep ever screwed up.

Constitutionally an early riser, I'm habitually up with the Sun. This means that as we march toward Midsummer, the year's Longest Light, I'm up earlier and earlier every day.

This, of course, is no inherent bad. Early morning is a good time to get things done: I'm fresh from sleep, it's still relatively cool, there are fewer distractions. Still, as the Sunstead (that's "solstice" in Witch) approaches, it does mean that I get less and less sleep every night.

(It doesn't help that I've been paring away at my caffeine consumption lately, either. A tea-drinker, son of tea-drinkers, I'm now down to two cups of green tea a day. Pathetic. Still, I find that what sleep I do get is qualitatively better than it used to be back in my pot-o'-black-a-day days.)

Then there's the matter of twilight, the “two lights.” At Midwinter, we lose our twilights: the Sun goes down, and it gets dark.  But come Midsummer, there's light in the sky long after the Sun goes down, and long before he comes up again. In Shetland, they call this the Simmerdim: the “Summerdim,” we non-Shetlanders might say, the extended twilight of the Lithedays, the Midsummer season.

Children of the Light, Children of the Seasons are we. As the Light waxes, together we enter a collective state of chronic sleep-deprivation.

On a whim the other day, I did an image search for “Yule ornaments.” What I found dismayed me.

Or rather, what I didn't find dismayed me.

Pentagrams, runes, Thor's hammers, witches on brooms: pagan schmuckerei for pretty much every taste and tradition.

Out of the first two screens, maybe 150 images in all, I found one Sun.

One.

For a moment, I felt a sense of vertigo, as if I were falling: a giddy kind of kinship with the “Keep Christ in Christmas” folks.

Solstice is relationship: Earth, Sun, Us.

Midwinter is to Midsummer as Yule is to —?

If you answered Litha, well...you're mostly right.

Midwinter and Midsummer are ancient. Cognate names survive in every living Germanic language, so they must have been known back in Common Germanic times, more than 2500 years ago.

Both holidays have by-names as well. The Hwicce—the Anglo-Saxon tribe ancestral (some say) to today's witches—also knew Midwinter as Géol and Midsummer as Líða.

Down the centuries Géol morphed into Yule. Líða didn't survive the passage of time, but during the 80s pagans rediscovered the word and gave it a new lease on life.

It's unclear what either word originally meant. Some have suggested that “Yule” may be kin either to gel—because it marks the coming of winter—or to yell, because “crying Yule” is a fine old midwinter's custom. In northern England, after Christmas services, people used to join hands and dance through the church shouting “Yule! Yule! Yule!”

I'll bet the vicar just loved that.

Did you know that a new Sun was born this year?

Astronomers estimate that, here in our Milky Way galaxy, there's a New Sun born at a frequency of about one a year.

One a year.

On the Thirteenth Day of Yule in the year 1153, Earl Harald Maddarðarson of Orkney was travelling from Stromness to Firth when he was caught in a blizzard. He and his companions took shelter from the storm in the famed Neolithic burial mound Maeshowe, where, interestingly, two of his party went mad. This delayed the travelers for so long, reports the Orkneyinga Saga, that they didn't reach Firth until well after dark.

Dating from around 2500 BCE, Maeshowe was well known to the Vikings, who ruled the Orkneys for more than 300 years. Carved into the stones of the mound's central chamber is one of the largest known collections of runic inscriptions in Europe. According to the longest,

Crusaders broke into Maeshowe. Líf Earl's-Cook carved these runes. To the northwest is a great treasure hidden. It was long ago that a great treasure was hidden here. Happy is he that might find that great treasure. Hákon alone bore treasure from this mound.

Maeshowe is famed for its orientation to the Winter Solstice sunset. For the last few years, on the morning of Midwinter's Eve, I've tuned in to the live on-site webcam to watch. What I saw there amazed me.

The last words of British painter J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) are reported to have been: The Sun is god.

And him not even a pagan.

Our Sun, our star. Our star, our god. We are sunlight and soil, literally, Earth and Sun our undeniable parents. In this Divine Family that we call the solar system, They are our Mother and our Father.

And what does one take more for granted than one's parents?

When did you last actually think about the Sun? Really see the Sun? Praise the Sun? Offer gratitude to the mighty Being without Whom we would not exist? Say thank you for the incomparable gift of light?

Remember when New Age discovered the Winter Solstice? Christmas Lite, without the baggage.

As a pagan, I grew to resent this. Not that the sunsteads—solstices—belong to us; they're a common inheritance. But don't be telling me about solstices, now. Some of us have been keeping them since, oh, the end of the last Ice Age or so, thank you very much. If not longer.

Somewhere around the third self-satisfied little sermon, I'd had enough, and started turning people into toads.