Breaking Up Christmas

Transforming yourself into a person who honors traditions has its benefits. Incorporating tried and true ways of our ancestors into our lives at holiday-times, for example, wakes something up inside us. We find our shallow roots diving down into human life, spreading through the topsoil of what our lives hold in our own generations and then even farther below, deepening into the rich loam of the wise people who have gone before us. The nourishment there sparkles with trace elements and minerals both mysterious and familiar. I don’t know about you, but when I drink the waters of life there, I find that they slake my thirst like nothing else.

My Blue Ridge Mountain region is filled with traditions. I’m learning more about an old Appalachian experience of the Christmas holiday. Why should this important time of light emerging from the darkness be given attention on only one day? From the old country, the settlers brought their celebration of “Old Christmas,” a celebration day on we now call Epiphany: January 6. The local people’s Irish-Ulster ancestors didn’t adhere to the set December 25 date required by the Gregorian calendar introduced in the 1750s; instead, they ”broke up Christmas,” celebrating important days throughout the entire holiday season, from late December through Epiphany. This final day of the Christmas season is seen as a sacred time when animals speak, elder bushes sprout from the frozen ground, and other expressions of nature and the Holy Spirit occur.

This year, we are having a ceremony on Old Christmas Day. It is our 27th wedding anniversary. The leader of our Nahua tradition, don David Wiley, is traveling here to lead Adam and me in renewing our wedding vows! Perhaps our special day falling on the traditional day of Old Christmas will lend us an extra blessing.

After all, those old people carried forward these ways for good, practical reasons. The traditions keep us connected, across the generations, to the mysterious source of what is really important in life.

I’m glad to learn more about Old Christmas, and it pleases me to picture some of the people in the hollers here celebrating this sacred day along with us and our ceremony guests.

In honor of Old Christmas, send down roots with these folks as they celebrate:

Reference: https://expatalachians.com/keep-appalachian-christmas-alive

Initiated as a tradition-holder in the Nahua/Mexican weather worker lineage in May 2003 by don Lucio Campos de Elizalde of Nepopualco, Morelos, Mexico, Erin Everett is a weather worker, ceremonial leader, and traditional healer. She is known in Nahuatl as a quiatlzques and in Spanish as a tiempera. As are many in this tradition, she was struck by lightning in her youth, which is a known calling to this path. A native of western North Carolina, she and her colleagues work with weather in the Asheville, NC geographical region. More information about their work, tradition, and teachers can be found at seedsoftradition.org.