thetroth.org

Mothers' Night Blót
2023-12-21 23:00 - 23:30 UTC
Join Rev. Maire Durkan for a Mothers’ Night Celebration to begin our Yule celebrations for 2023!
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Yule and Midwinter
According to Bede, the first night of Yule was “Mother Night,” the night before the winter solstice (i.e. either the 19th or 20th of December, depending on the year). It’s fairly common among modern Heathens to begin celebrating Yule on Mother Night (sunset on December 19) and end twelve nights later on New Year’s Eve (December 31). This has the advantage of fitting the secular holiday season well, which may make it easier to get some free time to celebrate the holiday.
We don’t know much more about “Mother Night” than the name that Bede gives, but modern Heathens often feel that this is the night to honor the family dísir, the women ancestors who still ward their living kin. It’s possible that the name is also a reminiscence of the Matronae, the goddesses or wights worshipped in Roman times along the Rhine. Since Roman soldiers from the Rhineland are known to have brought the cult of the Matronae to Britain, and since at least some Rhineland Franks seem to have settled in England along with the Angles and Saxons, it’s not impossible that a memory of the Matronae could have passed to the early English.
Scandinavia may have celebrated Yule somewhat later. Hákonar saga góða 13 describes how Hákon tried to uphold Christianity in his country, although in the end he did not succeed:

Hann setti þat í lǫgum at hefja jólahald þann tíma sem kristnir menn, ok skyldi þá hverr maðr eiga mælis ǫl, en gjalda fé ella, en halda heilagt, meðan ǫl ynnisk. En áðr var jólahald hafit hǫkunótt, þat var miðsvetrar nótt, ok haldin þriggja nátta jól.
He established in law that Yule would be held at the same time as the Christians, and then everyone had to have a measure of ale [i.e. brew ale from a certain measure of malt] or else pay a fine, and keep the holiday as long as the ale lasted. But previously, Yule was held at hǫkunótt, which was Midwinter Night, and three nights of Yule were celebrated.

This would be more helpful if we knew what hǫkunótt actually meant. Jan de Vries reviews doubtful suggestions that hǫku- might be connected with words for “witch” or “slaughter,” and also suggests a link with haki, “hook,” since this is the time when winter “hooks” or “rounds the turn” from its first half to its second half. Whatever its origin, de Vries identifies it as January 12, which would be near the exact midpoint of the winter half of the year in the Icelandic calendar, at least before the Gregorian reforms (Altnordisches Etymologisches Worterbuch, p. 280). The name survives in Danish høgenat and Swedish hökenatt, but Swedish hökenatt is defined as the longest night of the year, or in other words the winter solstice (Dalin, Ordbok, vol. 1, p. 751).
In Shetland and in parts of Norway, work had to stop on December 20, St. Thomas’s Day. In Shetland, knitting and sewing could continue until December 24, but after that, no household work could be done for the next twelve or sometimes 24 days (Marwick, The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland, pp. 118-119).
