Opinion
07 Dec 25

Rekindling the pagan spirit of midwinter – in a world where Christmas is more crass than class

We have to acknowledge that Christmas can be a difficult time for people who feel lonely and excluded – especially if they have recently lost someone they were close to. But for most of us, the mid-winter celebrations offer the opportunity to gather together, enjoy great food and wine and generally have the craic. Let’s make that as inclusive as possible in 2025.

For some of us, now is the winter of our discontent. But not everyone. And, especially at this time of year, most of us seek out comfort, candles and cuddles or what the Danes and Norwegians call hygge, usually defined as “creating a warm atmosphere and enjoying the good things in life with good people.”

Some of us up here on Hog Hill have also enjoyed the bad things in life with bad people, but that’s a story for another time.

In December, we like to celebrate the farmers and masons (no, not ‘freemasons’!) who built Newgrange over five millennia ago.

It’s not just the age and sophistication of the construction, built before Stonehenge and the Giza pyramid complex in Egypt.

It’s also what it embodies: a Stone Age community that worked together to build something that gave reassurance on the most existential of questions: will the darkness end?

The shaft of light traversing the wall inside Newgrange on every midwinter solstice morning still answers yes: that,from this moment onwards, the days will slowly lengthen and the sun will rise higher, bringing new life and energy into cold, damp fields.

Of course, for all the irritations of 2025, we wouldn’t swap places with those early farmers for all the honey in the Boyne Valley.

Their lives were tough, soggy, mostly cold and hungry, and often short. But we acknowledge, and often envy, how simple, genuine and clear things were for them.

Herd and protect the animals. Plant the seeds, then raise and protect the crops. Gather the seeds for next year and eat what’s left. Land, animals and people rest for winter. In Spring go again. And again.

They faced multiple threats from marauders, wild beasts and failed summers, from starvation and disease.

But they survived. Or enough of them did and so, here we are.

Truth be told, most of us are not their descendants. Our diverse genes entered the pool from many sources and directions over the five millennia since. It is a point worth remembering.

Each wave introduced newer metals, technologies and methods, like bronze and iron; new livestock, including horses;new crops of different varieties; and mew migrants come to Ireland to forge a new life.

When Christians arrived in the 3rd and 4th centuries, they co-opted the pagan midwinter into their celebration of the birth of their Messiah.

Druids and shamans now mixed with monks and mystics. But the ancient fundamentals endured.

SUPER RICH OLIGARCHS

Dr Niamh Wycherley from NUI Maynooth cites an early Irish monks’ chant for the first hour of Christmas Day.

There’s no mention of the birth of Christ, she says. Rather, “The antiphon...focusses on the joy of the monks at the prospect of shrinking hours of darkness following the winter solstice and the promise of increasing light each day.”

But by the 1300s Christmas had become a significant annual celebration, with echoes in the modern world.

Ireland’s medieval élites laid on great celebrations to influence and impress others, with their hospitality, power and wealth.

One such beano was thrown in New Ross by the Earl of Ormond, James Butler, for Christmas 1393.

The shopping list included dozens of sacks of grain and hundreds of kinds of poultry and fish. As for meat, his cook ordered ‘60 good bullocks; 4 boars; 80 large pigs; 60 small pigs’, and more.

New Ross at the time was the largest port in Ireland, a gateway to the south-east, and beyond, for goods from France, including wine. And Butler took his cut.

In Christmas & The Irish: A Miscellany, historian Yvonne Seale cites another Christmas party from 1351, this one thrown by Uilliam Buí Ó Ceallaigh, ruler of Uí Mháine.

He was house-warming his recently built castle on the Roscommon shores of Lough Ree.

The invitees included the “seven chief orders of the poets”, brehons, bards, harpers, seanchaís, gamesters or common kearógs, and jesters and other entertainers.

Every ligger going the road!

So many turned up that O’Ceallaigh built a temporary village for them. (Housing problem? What housing problem?!)

It was one hell of a do, a medieval Midwinter Electric Picnic, and it lasted for a whole month.

Guests were even given gifts and they all left happy and praising Uilliam Buí.

Which, of course, was the whole point.

Much of this information is taken from a poem written (as Gaeilge) by one of the chief poets who’d been a guest at the party.

You couldn’t call it a review. It’s pure plámás, akin to the bootlicking an autocrat might expect from subjugated media in 2025.

So, there’s nothing new about throwing a big party and inviting every entertainer, journalist and influencer to make you look good. Panem et circensis.

A rich and powerful fella like Uilliam Buí was able to corral the wordsmiths.

Control the message and you control the record.

That’s still the way. Autocrats strangle open and honest reportage.

And it’s not just government leaders, it’s also very powerful, super-rich oligarchs and mega-corporations.

MORE CRASS THAN CLASS

Speaking of which, what are we to make of the decision of the board of Tesla to give Elon Musk a (results-based) salary of a trillion dollars?

Folks, that’s a million millions.

How could anyone need that? How much money is a person’s work worth? And where will the money go?

The same might be asked of OTHERS about pay-for-dinners, dodgy deals, cryptocurrency dealings and scams, and the degree to which the boundaries between personal aggrandisement and political dealings are bing deliberately dismantled in the Usin particular.

This being Christmas, many and various pieties will be rolled out over coming weeks, not all sincere.

Well, by their works should ye judge them, not their words.

The current ruling elite in the US has strong conservative Christian support and many millions of US citizens espouse Christian ways and beliefs.

The Christian iteration of midwinter is associated with peace and good will.

Indeed. Isn’t “turn the other cheek” attributed to Christ? But how can this be reconciled with blasting Gaza, and Ukraine, back to the Stone Age?

Or, indeed, with the possibility that the world’s warmongers may yet dump us all back there?

Also, since Christ and his family had to make do with a stable, Christmas is associated with tackling homelessness, and with benevolence and charity. Not to mention the dangers of unfettered wealth.

After all, wasn’t it Christ who threw the moneylenders out of the temple and told his followers that it was easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter paradise, and who said it is more blessed to give than to receive?

How do the conservative Christians who back the present US regime reconcile that –with a culture in which people are valued by their celebrity and wealth rather than their kindness and generosity?

Where those that serve themselves are more admired than those who serve others?

Where Christmas is more crass than class?

Wouldn’t it be more appropriate, in particular for those with more money than a middle-sized country, to practice what’s preached, to remember the ghosts of Christmas past and to give rather than grab?

On that note, and in anticipation of long evenings “creating a warm atmosphere and enjoying the good things in life with good people”, we wish you all a Merry Midwinter.

Take care out there!