Winter solstice

Yes, you might have noticed that we're in our winter garb because today we're celebrating solstice.

Winter solstice.

Winter solstice.

I'm sorry, we're done with that now.

Guys, it's Winter Solstice.

It's the Christmas

special and I'm so excited.

And she... is very much still having a hard time after the war because obviously we ended up you know we we closed out the big battle in no quarter wings and ruin she is having a little bit of ptsd because she did indeed watch her mate die in front of her so she's like really casually Yeah, she's like really struggling.

Now, did they somehow influence the native people of Mexico and cause them to accept their holiday? It's possible, and who can say that the two days aren't in some fashion linked.

Now, winter solstice is a special holiday.

It usually takes place in December, early December.

It celebrates the rebirth of the sun.

And if he should encounter anyone wearing old clothing, he'll eat them up.

There'll be nothing left.

So on that day, Yule, the winter solstice, you must always wear brand new clothes.

Least you come upon the Yule cat who will eat you.

He was an Icelandic historian living in the 13th century.

He placed the celebration of a holiday called Yule on midwinter's nights.

The problem with that is that Midwinter's Nights isn't really something that we have a hard date for.

Historians have put it anywhere between December 14th and February 2nd.

It is worth noting that Bede makes no mention of another holiday during this period, so it's possible that what he called Modrnit was in fact the Yule sacrifice celebration that took place during Midwinter's Nights, and it could just be that Midwinter's Nights in fact did fall around the solstice.

So Snorri and Bede could be talking about the same holiday and just applying two different names to it, but they could just as well be talking about two completely different holidays.

Once again, worth mentioning that while Norse paganism and Germanic paganism are very, very similar and definitely share roots, there could be differences between what the Anglo-Saxons did and what the Norwegians and Danes who inhabited Iceland did.

And I mean, I'm going to back that up and say she has multiple sensitivities to so many things.

And we at Winter Solstice one year, we handed everybody one of those chocolate coins.

Yeah.

And she we didn't explain what it was.

It's not just the standard ones.

Like, I, I honestly, I was trying to organize something like this myself where we could talk about, like, someone's gonna write a Winter Solstice story.

Someone's gonna write, like, you know.

[laughs] But then it kind of fell apart, and that's fine.

I'm joined by Dr. Tom Schmidt, a Yale-trained scholar of early Christianity and the New Testament, who's published research on the origins of Christmas.

We're gonna walk through all the evidence, the Roman sun god, the winter solstice, and a fascinating Greek inscription carved onto a statue of the bishop Hippolytus that helps explain how December 25th started to make sense.

So with that, let's get into it.

All right, I'm here with Dr. Tom Schmidt.

Before the internet, before TV, we're doing that all the time, constantly.

We're very aware of the patterns and the phases of the moon and of the sun and how the sun will la- in the Northern Hemisphere will stay out longer and get higher in the sky in the summer and the opposite in winter.

And it's a natural human reaction to see uh, to realize when the winter solstice occurs, that the sun is now out longer.

We see this across all cultures.

...

when, when they wanna say, "Oh, December 25th, the re- the sun rests for three days, and then it rises on the, on the fourth day or December 25th after the solar-- winter solstice," um, this is be, this is because Christians worship the sun on Sunday.

Well-

Mm-hmm

... uh, one, we can say that the solar phenomenon is emblematic of Christ, but I was looking into the historicity of December 25th or the, the winter solstice, and all the way to Hippolytus of Rome.

Already w- they were speculating the first 300 years what was the date of Christ, not based on astrology, but based on their calendars and traditions passed down-

Mm-hmm

Exactly.