The winter season got me, like many people, thinking about aspects of our culture like commercialism, gifting, and money. As do probably quite a lot of people in the wider Pagan community, our family celebrates a kind of blended version of the Pagan Yule and the secular Christmas (which should be a contradiction in terms, but certainly for most people I know there's not a lot of Christ in the festive season - which itself of course pre-dates Christianity. Perhaps we should call the modern iteration, with its inflatable Santas and themed hand soap dispensers, something slightly different, like ChristmasTM).
Anyway. There are aspects of modern Christmas that I really love, and which suit our extended family with its Pagan/agnostic/atheist/Methodist blend. I love mulled wine and roasted chestnuts, Christmas stockings and carol singing, roast dinners with bread sauce and Brussels sprouts (controversial!), visits to Santa's grotto and the big Christmas lights switch-on in town. What I don't love, and this is hardly ground-breaking (someone in the Guardian usually writes a similar column each year, for starters) is the rampant commercialism, over-advertising, over-saturation and glorification of all-out balls-to-the-wall consumerism.
This is where, for me, the gentler Yule traditions really come into their own. We're kind of feeling our way into what works for our family, as there are so many different practices associated with the season and already so much to do at this time that to try to re-enact all the aspects of a traditional twelve-day celebration would lead to total overwhelm. But it does help to remind me of some of the origins of our modern celebrations, and that keeping things simple isn't always the worst idea and in fact much more in keeping with the history of this ancient festival. Instead of buying more decorations and more plastic crap every year, we collect pine cones and holly branches.
Yuletide, though, is one of the few times of the year when I feel that consumerism is largely absent from modern Paganism. The rest of the time, it seems to be part and parcel, sometimes even a main aspect. Consider: we are encouraged to own not just one Tarot or oracle deck, but to collect several - or many. Crystals, a limited resource, we often treat almost as disposable - leave one here, bury one there, buy three or seven or however many for each working, rite or spell. We are encouraged not just to have sufficient of any given item but to build collections. People seem to compete on social media to have the largest, fanciest, most 'aesthetic' of altars, even if that means buying new statues and altar cloths and other decorations with every turn of the Wheel.
I realise it's a fine balance, as we want to support the artists and artisans in our communities, as well as the shops and small businesses, but as gift shops and crystal shops abound at every mystical or sacred site, and our communities both on and offline come to revolve around shops, markets and commerce, perhaps we need to get realistic about how much is really enough.
In the introduction to her book Seasons of a Magical Life, H. Byron Ballard muses that there seem to be less Pagans cleaning up streams and picking up litter - practical tasks to build relationship with the land - than there are sitting behind their screens quibbling over practices and terminology. To this I would add that also, we are shopping. You can literally buy a witchcraft-in-a-box kit; but for me part of the practice, part of the experience, part of the point, is in the finding, the growing, the making, the foraging, the adapting, the cobbling-together. The more we buy our tools and our spells, the less involved we are with the mud and the roots, the blood and the bones, the craft. If you can download an app to tell you when the moon rises, you stop needing to look at the sky.
