Why is Yule Also Called Christmas?
Most years the holiday season tends to sneak up on us — it seems we’ve just packed away the Halloween costumes when it’s time to start decking those damn halls.
In recent years, the end-of-year hustle and bustle includes people hotly debating the correctness of wishing each other a Merry Christmas as opposed to Happy Holidays or other more generic, less Christian-oriented names for the mid-winter holiday, such as the Winter Solstice or Yule. How one defines the late-December holiday has (stupidly) become a hot-button political statement.
Pitching a tantrum over a coffee cup. C’mon people. Get a grip.
Those asserting the holiday cannot be rightly known as anything other than Christmas often claim to have history and tradition on their side. This may be true beginning with the globalization of Christianity. But humankind was celebrating the return of the sun (or “son”) long before the advent of Jesus of Nazareth.
Historically, it’s more a question of why Yule is also called Christmas, instead of the other way around. A staggering number of traditions that are now associated with Christmas are actually much older Pagan practices, used by…
