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The Holidays are Hard as a Pagan

The Holidays are Hard as a Pagan

Last updated on: December 20, 2024 at 10:15 am by Rev. Emily Guenther

The Holidays are Hard as a Pagan 2024-12-19T14:37:19-06:00 Rev. Emily Guenther

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The holidays can be hard as a Pagan. The holidays can be hard for everyone, I understand that. When you add in something such as a different religion to the mainstream Christian holiday culture, some Pagans feel left out in the cold. I believe that our religion, our traditions, and our gods grow and evolve with the changing times. And if all of that is possible, then why can’t our holiday practices also grow and evolve?

Yule Ornament - May Your Holiday be filled with Magick and Love

Yule Ornament – May Your Holidays be filled with Magic and Love

Not Celebrating Holidays on the Actual Day

One of the things that makes the holidays hard for this Pagan is the fact that I don’t get to celebrate my Pagan holidays. Not the way I’d like to. I began my Pagan path with Wicca, like many people do. Over the years, my beliefs and practices have evolved to include other religious traditions as well. In Wicca, we have 8 Sabbats. And the only one that is typically easy to celebrate is Samhain, thanks to Halloween.

If you are lucky enough to find yourself in a situation where you can set aside time to celebrate your Pagan holidays on the appropriate day, congratulations! However most of us can’t, and those lucky enough to be able to often find themselves doing so alone. Being a solitary Pagan or celebrating a Sabbat alone is not a bad thing, not at all. It has its perks. But being able to celebrate with friends or family can be much more enjoyable. The holidays were typically days of community for the ancients, and I feel like a social component is built in to many of our Sabbats and holy days. There has been a bigger push for community recently and the winter holidays tend to bring that out in us.

Candlelit labyrinth for the holiday

Candlelit labyrinth

December 21 is the winter solstice, Yule. As much as I’d love to be able to celebrate on December 21st, I won’t be able to. I work in retail and service which means that my weekends are the busiest times for business and I will definitely have to be at work. This “issue” is something I have made peace with over the years. Our church, The Fellowship of Avalon – ATC, is hosting our Yule ritual on Sunday, December 22. It’s just the next day. It is going to be a wonderful event, no doubt about it. But sometimes I still wish that we could declare Yule (or Imbolc or Beltane, etc) as a holiday and have the day off just like the world stops for Christmas on December 25. Witchful thinking I suppose.

Finding time to celebrate Yule in the middle of all the Christmas activities can be difficult. And when things are difficult or seem like they are too much work, we often don’t do them.

Create Your Own Holiday Traditions

One of the things we can do as Pagans is create our own holiday traditions. When we establish families and friend groups, it is likely that we will begin creating traditions with those people in our lives. And those traditions may grow and evolve as your family and friends circle also evolves. Growing up our family had fairly normal Christmas traditions. We would visit with my dad’s side of the family on Christmas Eve and my mom’s side of the family Christmas day. Then I grew up and life happened, and we stopped those traditions somewhat. And then sometime over the last 15 or so years, a new tradition was born in its place.

The current tradition is that we go to my aunt’s house on Christmas morning for breakfast. After we’ve eaten and hung out, my family comes home and opens our Christmas presents and has a lazy afternoon and evening. It’s a little different – we don’t get to eat ham and turkey and dressing again, but my aunt makes amazing scrambled eggs and everyone loves my husband’s hashbrown casserole. And I’ve learned to enjoy it because it prolongs the Christmas excitement.

That is a very mundane example, but we can apply this to our spiritual practices as well. We see some of this in the modern filching of Christmas songs and making the lyrics much more Pagan. And some of you probably add in the sci-fi and horror components that are traditional to the definition of the word filching.

Author and husband visiting Santa

Update Your Holiday Traditions

You can update your Pagan holiday traditions is more subtle ways too. Hearth magick is a topic I used to teach on a lot. It’s a relatively simple concept of using what you already have at home to create spells. This can be similar to hoodoo, conjure or folk magic in many ways. But for me, hearth and cottage magick often focuses on enchanting a physical item to be magickal in some way. Take your holiday wreath for your door and charge it to be protective, or to bring good energy in every time the door is opened. As Pagans, we can take, or re-borrow if you will, mainstream holiday items and use them magickally. We can do that for anything really.

Another way that we can modernize our Pagan holidays is by incorporating modern ideas into the customs the ancients set for us. I practice Wicca as one of my faith paths but I also follow a Norse practice. In Norse Paganism, the night before the winter solstice is known as Mother’s Night. Mother’s Night is sacred to Frigg, Freya, and the Disir. The disir are our holy ancestral mothers, both those people we knew in life as well as older ancestors long before our time. Mother’s Night is typically celebrated on December 20 and kicks off the 12 Days of Yule for many Heathens.

Freya statue (left) and Frigg statue (right) on holiday altar

Freya statue (left) and Frigg statue (right)

If you’ve been around me long enough, you know I love Mother’s Night. And I make sure I spend some time at my altar each Mother’s Night. This is typically a Norse tradition and focuses on Norse concepts such as the disir as well as certain Norse goddesses. But I would be remiss if I limited my Mother’s Night devotions to just Frigg, Freya and my mother and grandmother. I take this time to also honor Sekhmet, who is my matron Goddess to whom I am dedicated. I also honor the people in my lives who may have been motherly to me. That’s not exactly in the spirit of what the ancient Norse were doing, but I’m not one of the ancients yet and I don’t think they would mind anyway.

Take Care of Yourself During the Holidays

Regardless of your particular Pagan practice, I hope you find time in these next few weeks to celebrate your holy days. This time of year comes with enough pressure and stress and dread. Don’t add to it by forcing yourself to keep to traditions that don’t serve you whether those be mundane family traditions or trying to recreate rituals that don’t hold meaning for you.

Many of us are not feeling the usual holiday spirit this year. This could be an opportunity to begin new traditions. And remember, the holidays are not supposed to be a contest. If you are content sitting at home with the lights off watching horror movies all day on December 25, don’t feel like your holiday is less than those who choose to attend multiple Christmas events. 2025 is going to be an interesting year. Take the time you have now to ground, center and celebrate the things that make you happy and bring you peace. We’re going to need it.

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