Yule is the holiday around the winter solstice. The exact length varies with the time and place, but we celebrate 12 days and 13 nights. The last night of Yule is the last night of the year, with the new year beginning the next day. There are many ways that people celebrate Yule, this is just what we do at our house.

There is a multitude of different ways that people reckon the dates of Yule, and as far as I can tell none of them carries any greater weight than the others. The fact is, historically people weren't always sure exactly when the solstice was, so it probably doesn't matter that much. We begin Yule at dusk on December 19th so that the last night of Yule matches up with the Gregorian calendar for the new year. Another common reckoning is to begin Yule on the 20th and count 12 nights. Some people start with Midwinter's night and then count 12 or 13 nights. That puts the religious observance of the new year a few days after the secular new year. I find it easier to explain to people that modern celebrations come from old Heathen ones, without having to explain why I celebrate New Year's a few days late.

Midwinter is the longest night of the year. When you look at the solstice date on a calendar, this might be that night, or the night before, depending on what time of day the moment of solstice occurs. If the solstice is before noon, then the preceeding night is Midwinter, and if it is after noon then the longest night of the year begins that evening.

We usually get a tree the first weekend in December and decorate it right away. Eric wanted to wait and get it on the 19th and decorate it that night, but I argued that kids would never stand for waiting so long, and he eventually gave up the fight. We also hang up the stockings over the fireplace then.

December 19th – Mother's Night
Mother's Night or Modranecht is the first night of Yule. The 19th never coincides with Midwinter as far as I'm aware. We greet Yule by circling our house three times while carrying fire and chanting “Come, those who wish to come; Stay, those who wish to stay; Fare, those who wish to fare; harmless to me and mine.” This is a fairly common practice. I think we got it from Our Troth, but it's been so long that I'm not sure where we first saw it. After we come inside we eat a festive dinner and after dinner we drink hot cocoa (or other special drinks) and open our stocking stuffers. We also call our mothers and grandmothers to wish them happy Mother's Night. They take this with varying degrees of curiosity, but are happy to have us call and we explain that it's like Mother's Day.

For the following four days we do the following three things, with Midwinter inserted in there somewhere.

December 20th or 21st (whichever is not Midwinter)
On the second non-Midwinter night of Yule we build gingerbread houses for visiting wights to use as guest houses for the duration of the holiday. This takes pretty much the whole evening and is lots of fun. We set them on the mantel and then at midnight on New Year's Eve or, if we are out at midnight, the morning of New Year's Day, we take them outside and smash them to make sure everybody goes home. This tradition comes from present-day Norway; I first learned about it from a coworker who lived in Oslo for several years when her children were young. She didn't explain the reasoning behind building the houses and smashing them on New Year's Eve, but it seems pretty obvious from a Heathen perspective. Another acceptable way to destroy the houses is to eat them, but after they've been out for a week and a half getting dusty – yuck!

December 21st or 22nd (whichever is not Midwinter)
Before dinner we make food mounds, one per person, and set out Yule ale. These are kind of like snacks sitting out during a party – they are there for visiting wights to eat during Yule. There are some traditions about what the food mounds should be built out of – bases of bread and cheese with apples and nuts for decoration, for example – but there's plenty of room for adding things that the builder especially likes and being creative. Apparently, one special thing to do with food mounds is to have a bird sitting on top. We found some styrofoam and feather birds with clips on the bottoms at World Market and got a pack of them to use. They worked pretty well last year, and we still have 11 of the 12 birds to use in future years (one didn't make it). I think I got this idea from Our Troth. I've been doing it since I first started exploring Heathenry.

December 22nd or 23rd (Whichever is not Midwinter)
We take cuttings from evergreens in our yard and use them to decorate the house. We have an abundance of juniper and rosemary around here, and some holly, too. We have planted more holly recently in addition to what's growing wild. Evergreens symbolize life continuing through the winter. This is one of those traditions that never died out; both of our families did this when we were children.

Midwinter:
On Midwinter, before dusk, we start a fire. Before we had the wood stove we lit a large candle. Each year the Yule-fire is started using a piece of charcoal left over from the previous year's fire. We bring in plenty of firewood before dark to minimize the need to go outside during the night. We have a festive dinner and then after dinner we open the presents under the tree. We stay up all night playing with them, or playing games, or pretty much doing whatever we have to to keep awake to watch over the fire. Not everyone has to stay awake all night, but there needs to be someone awake at all times. This is where having extended family would come in handy, and in the absence of Heathen extended family we have Heathen friends. We usually invite a few people over – generally those who would be trying to stay awake by themselves – to share in the awakeness duties and because it's easier to play more games with several people. I imagine that when we have older kids, trying to stay up all night will be quite the exciting thing. At dawn we go outside and face east and hail the sun who has prevailed over the darkness of the longest night of the year. Then we all go sleep for a few hours and let the fire die.

The rest of Yule is very flexible, because parties and events come up on different days each year. We usually have dinner with Eric's family on the 25th, and in years past the Hof's Yule feast has fallen during this time. On nights when there aren't other plans we do the following things, in roughly this order:

String berries and popcorn and other stringable snacks for outdoor wights, and use them to decorate the bushes outside.

Make a batch of wassail and sprinkle it on some of the fruit trees on our property to wassail them, and hang pieces of bread dipped in cider on them. We have so many cherry trees in the woods that we would inevitably miss some if we tried to get them all, but we do wassail some of the larger cherries, persimmons, and apple trees. We discovered a serviceberry tree this spring and will add it to the list.

Make straw goats for next Yule. We haven't done this one yet because something else came up the night we planned to do it last year. Decorating with straw goats and burning them on New Year's Eve is traditional to this day in Scandinavia, but they're expensive to buy and we're not so skilled at making them that we don't need some on hand to use for patterns. So the idea is to decorate at the beginning of Yule with our old goats , then use them as patterns to make new ones, then burn the old ones and keep the new ones for next year.

Sprinkle the Yule ale (which has been sitting out since early during the holiday) on the goats and gardens to ensure health and fertility. Presumably, from sitting on the table during most of Yule it has been blessed repeatedly and has become very holy. This folk tradition died out fairly recently, I think, and I'm not sure it died out entirely. I don't know where we first heard about it, but lots of websites mention the practice. This takes us quite some time because we have a lot of sprinking to do, and by the time we're done we usually just want to go inside and drink something hot.

New Year's Eve is the night when everyone is a Heathen. Pretty much everything people do comes from Heathen traditions: new year's resolutions (oaths), drinking and toasting, making noise at midnight. I'm not so sure about mistletoe; it might be Celtic. The resolutions, drinking, and toasting are of course sumbel. If we're at home by ourselves we offer some toasts and resolutions at dinner, but with two adults and a small child it's not a very lively sumbel. We do stay up until midnight and then burn the straw goats and make lots of noise. This is to make sure that all the otherworldly wights go back home before the doorway between worlds is difficult to pass through. We set off poppers in each room of the house, smash the gingerbread houses outside, and dump the food mounds in the compost heap. Poppers are a nineteenth century British invention usually used at Christmas, but they seem ideal for this purpose.

As you can see, we don't have an activity for each night of Yule. We have always had enough party invitations and other things to go to that we've never needed more at-home activities than this. Often we don't even have this many nights at home, and we end up combining two activities into one night. And all of these are living traditions which are modified to suit our needs and improved or changed each year as we see fit.