The Evergreen Shrine: which plants are sacred and who's asking?

& I've opened my books for coaching sessions in January!

Dear friends,

Today I’m sharing an excerpt from a book of winter folklore that will come out with the publisher Hyldyr next year.

And for those who would benefit from one-on-one support in their creative pursuits, I have opened my books for a limited number of business and creative coaching sessions in January. Click here to make an appointment!

Paid subscribers can listen to the audio recording of this post below.

What’s so special about the evergreen at Christmas?

Evergreens are so pervasive in the iconography of midwinter that it is hard to call the Yule season to mind without also conjuring an image of something green and waxy: a fir tree covered in lights, holly or mistletoe, or at least a plastic representation of such foliage. So why do we moderns venerate the green bough in the dark months, and ignore it in the summer? Romantics will argue evergreens are a survival from pre-Christian ritual, folklorists will often tell you they represent eternal life and renewal, and a popular Christmas carol would suggest these boughs represent the miracle of Christ’s birth. All of these theories have their merits, and at the same time none of them captures the whole picture of why the evergreen radiates with such charisma in wintertime. But is it possible we are asking the wrong questions about these plants? After all, how could you expect any being to answer the question, what do you mean? The only sensible response to that question is to whom?”

Let us consider the deep human intertwinement with trees, the largest of the plants we interact with, and the primary diplomats of the vegetal world to humankind. Trees are our original shelter, food and fuel. We evolved from primates, the earliest of which were also tree-dwellers. After glaciation, it’s once trees have found their footing that we people follow in numbers. Though we can survive in treeless lands, we are, in our essence, tree people. Trees have a central place in creation stories of northern Europe, like in Norse myth, where they are instrumental in the creation, organization, and destruction of the cosmos. The universe itself takes the shape of a great ash tree called Yggdrasil, a name meaning “Odin’s horse,” upon whose branches and roots the many worlds hang. According to Snorri Sturluson’s 12th century Prose Edda, the first man was called Ask, ash, and the first woman Embla, possibly elm. After Ragnarok, another human pair, Líf and Lífþrasir, life and lover of life, shelter in a wood called Hoddmímis holt, possibly another name for Yggdrasil, from where they will repopulate the world. The human cycle of life begins and ends in the shelter of trees, and when we desire to celebrate life and its important moments, we are in good company when we turn to the trees for support.

The once widespread traditional practice of hauling a large tree trunk – often called a Yule log – indoors to be burned in the central fireplace across one or many days around Christmas reflects this same ancestral resonance between trees and destiny. The darkest days of midwinter are a favoured time for prosperity magic, and the earliest account of the Yule log custom from England, a 1648 poem by ¹, foregrounds the invocation of luck as an intention behind the practice, beside the more on-the-nose reason that the strenuous group activity provides an occasion for abundant merriment and drinking.

Come, bring with a noise,

My merry, merry boys,

The Christmas Log to the firing;

While my good Dame, she

Bids ye all be free;

And drink to your heart's desiring.

With the last year's brand

Light the new block, and

For good success in his spending,

On your Psaltries play,

That sweet luck may

Come while the log is a-tinding.

The kindling of a ceremonial fire at midwinter resonates with the central ritual desire at this time of year, which is to welcome the light and the warmth of the sun to return at its time of greatest distance. We court the sun with symbolic fire, using fuel generously granted by the vegetation we find growing all around us, whose life is a testament to the sun’s nourishment throughout the warmer, gentler half of the year.

Brightest shining in the modern mind is a plant so central to modern Yule that within the relevant season it can be referred to as simply “the tree” – this plant is an evergreen cut, dragged indoors, and covered with lights and trinkets, awaiting a lustrous spread of brightly-wrapped gifts that will be laid underneath on the morning of Christmas Day. The earliest account of a decorated “Christmas tree” comes from Germany in 1604, where a Strasbourg chronicle mentions protestants bringing fir trees into their homes to hang them with “roses made of colored paper, apples, wafers, tinsel, sweetmeats etc.²” The Christmas tree tradition spread slowly abroad over the next two centuries, finally blooming into broad popularity in the context of Victorian domestic sentimentalism and the consumerism made possible by industrialization, which provided small trinkets and gifts with which to dress the tree. The adornment of an evergreen at midwinter with candles, and later, strings of coloured electric lights, provides a warm centrepiece to the interior space of the family home, evoking the primordial wood where the light of life began as the smallest glimmer, growing stronger with the waxing of the year into summer’s full blaze, too mighty to contain within the confines of the modest living room. The flame of the world’s light is small enough to hold in the hand in winter, an object of fascination and hope.

Though the Christmas tree as we know it seems to have entered popular consciousness somewhat by chance, there is without doubt something universal in its character. Trees have been the site of offerings for as long as anyone knows, and prior to Christianization in Europe they were widely understood to be the dwelling of the gods. Sacred trees were so important to their pagan communities that when St. Boniface endeavoured to convert the Saxon residents of Hesse to Christianity in the 8th century, his most infamous deed was to cut down the Oak of Donar, where the pagans made offerings to the Saxon thunder god. Worth mentioning also is the similarity that the decorated Christmas tree bears to the “clootie trees” which still receive reverent visitors in historically Celtic areas of the British Isles. Clooties, whose name derives from “cloth” are strips of fabric left tied to branches of trees, often hawthorns, as prayers for healing or offerings to the saint, fairies, or spirits of the place. Most of these “clootie trees” stand next to sacred springs, the springs themselves often being referred to as “clootie wells.” With examples from every time and place on earth, a tree shrine bedecked with offerings is one of the most sacred and ancient sights. The desire to leave offerings and prayers with a tree is as old as our genetic memory of fruit and nut; the tree bears gifts and therefore is a natural site for the request of gifts and the offering of them in return.

Since much of land-based folk tradition has receded from daily experience, we now look upon decking the halls at Yule as an unusual practice, when for most of history decorating our homes and temples with vegetation was anything but. In parallel with our reverence for the free-standing tree, a survey of historical practice would show decorative vegetation wreathing every celebration of the year, from spring catkins through summer flower garlands to midwinter’s holly and ivy. That isn’t to say the practice wasn’t deeply meaningful. The symbolism attributed to different plants is a complex network of their medicinal or food properties, their appearance, their life cycles, and relationships with other plants and animals. The evergreens most heavily associated with midwinter celebrations in northern Europe – holly, ivy, and mistletoe, are notable primarily because they both retain their leaves and bear fruit in the winter months, when most other plants behave in the opposite way. Therefore they naturally align with the wintertime abundance magic so central to traditional solstice celebrations across time.

As a plant connected with midwinter celebrations mistletoe is one of the earliest noted in Europe for its use in ritual. Pliny the Elder wrote about the significance of mistletoe to Gaulish druids in the first century, reporting that these Celtic bards harvest the mistletoe found growing on oak with special care, as this is the tree after which, Pliny says, they took their name. The ritual of cutting mistletoe found growing on an oak signals the deep importance of both of these plants to the druids, as it involves the sacrifice of two white bulls, and the employment of a golden sickle, as Pliny describes:

Having made all due preparation for the sacrifice and a banquet beneath the trees, they bring thither two white bulls, the horns of which are bound then for the first time. Clad in a white robe the priest ascends the tree, and cuts the mistletoe with a golden sickle, which is received by others in a white cloak. They then immolate the victims, offering up their prayers that God [sic] will render this gift of his propitious to those to whom he has so granted it. It is the belief with them that the mistletoe, taken in drink, will impart fecundity to all animals that are barren, and that it is an antidote for all poisons.³

Pliny adds that mistletoe is referred to by the druids as “all healing,” and the above passage demonstrates that not only does it heal ills, but it also imparts fertility. This particular life-giving quality endures today in the tradition of kissing beneath a mistletoe sprig at midwinter. In Norse mythology, the most bright and beautiful god, Baldr, was killed by an arrow made of mistletoe, as this plant was the only plant that was absent when his mother Frigg made all of creation swear it would not harm him after she had a prophetic dream that he would die. Völuspá, the Old Norse seeress’ prophecy, predicts that Baldr will return in the peaceful time when the world is renewed after it ends at Ragnarok. Despite its fatal role in Baldr’s story, because of its association with this youthful god of rebirth and possibly of light, it seems mistletoe was at this time associated with both death and rebirth, a fitting combination for an herb now connected so deeply with the magic of midwinter, when the sun appears to die and be reborn.

Though many churches eventually came to embrace the irresistible and intuitive practice of decking the halls with inspiring and merry-making foliage, early Christian leaders were aware of the practice’s origin in pagan religious tradition, and therefore warned against bringing plants they understood to have special significance into the home at midwinter. In the 6th century, Martin of Braga warned against lauro aut viriditate arborum cingere domos, “decking houses around with laurel and fresh branches.”⁴ In addition to its better-known associations with victory, in antiquity Laurel was also connected with prophecy; a laurel was said to grow at the opening to the underworld at the temple of Delphi.⁵ Laurel was also understood to provide protection from lightning and fire.⁶ Midwinter celebrations mark a threshold, the turning point in the solar year, and a movement from death and into new life. Protection and prophecy are two features of laurel’s lore that would make it a good friend to humankind in the transition between years, a liminal time of change, when supernatural support is needed, and a time when, by virtue of that supernatural presence, the prospect of the future opens up in our consciousness.

Holly and ivy are two herbs most strongly associated with Yule today, as in the popular carol, the Holly and the Ivy, whose refrain reports “of all the trees that are in the wood the holly bears the crown,” but their special place in folk tradition extends beyond this season alone. The two are often paired together in folk songs, sometimes appearing in the refrain of ballads, such as “Sing Ivy,” a song that shares verses with the supernatural ballad “the Elfin Knight,” describing miraculous ways the land is worked by the otherworldly singer, after their father (or mother) bequeaths them an acre of land. From a version sung by Jim and Bob Copper of Sussex:

My father had an acre of land

Ee oh, sing ivy

My father had an acre of land

And a bunch of green holly and ivy

He ploughed it with a team of rats

Ee oh, sing ivy

He ploughed it with a team of rats

And a bunch of green holly and ivy

He sowed it with a pepper box…

He harrowed it with a small-tooth comb…

He rolled it down with a rolling pin…

He reaped it the blade of his penknife…

He threshed it with a wad of straw…

He winned it on the brim of his hat…

He sent it to market on a louse’s back…

And now the poor old man is dead.⁷

This carol is worthy of mention because it demonstrates holly and ivy were associated with the supernatural at any time of year, though their peak influence was clearly midwinter, when their leaves and berries remained visible on the bough, and when carols grappled with their mysterious powers.

Though it varies regionally, British folk tradition is clear about the fact that decking the halls with evergreens, especially holly, ivy, and mistletoe, was not only an aesthetic matter but a ritual one, foremost. This fact is evidenced by the clear rules in each region about when evergreens should be brought into the house for Yule, when they ought to be removed again, and whether or not, at that time, they should be placed in the household fire. In England there was a general consensus that evergreens should not be brought in until Christmas Eve, and most believed they should be removed at the end of the twelve days of Christmas, on Epiphany, though in some areas they might be kept until Candlemas, on February 2nd. A description of the custom in Wales from 1897 gives a ready summary of some of the typical taboos and the consequences of ignoring them:

A bough of mistletoe was hung in my house on Saturday and a lady seeing it on Sunday said that it was bad luck to hang mistletoe in the house before Christmas Eve. If it were done, she said, a death in the family might be looked for before the new year was out. Holly, too, put up at Christmas for decoration should, I am told, on no account be taken down before Candlemas day nor left up after that day. I was told by an old man, at Leebotwood, Shropshire, who refused to have the holly taken down before that day, on which morning he mounted a chair and carefully removed it. ⁸

The strict guidance passed down between generations around how one ought to handle Christmas evergreens testifies to the deep respect these plants command. Though it often entertains, as in the “Sing Ivy” carol, or delights, as with the cheerful red of holly berries winking in firelight, folk tradition also conveys through its practices models of right-relationship between humankind and the other beings on Earth.

Holly, ivy and their verdant kin are handled carefully in relation to timing because these plants – with their mythic ability to give both life and death – along with time itself are held sacred in the worldview that places relationship at the centre of societal order and well-being. The relational worldview is natural to us when we are paying attention. So what is the meaning of evergreens in winter? How can we look upon them with fresh eyes when we are so accustomed to their presence we mistake them for mere symbols? We might as well ask the evergreens themselves. And in listening for the answer, if we are lucky, we might hear a little something about what we mean as well.

---

Join me in the New Year at the Cave of Dreams workshop series with my friend , storyteller Daniel Allison! Sign up for all four before the first session to receive a sweet discount. ✨