By Crasterfarian
Long before Christmas had a name, before shepherds and kings, mangers and virgins, before carefully chosen dates, people here already knew this time of year mattered.
In the deepest reach of winter, when the sun was weakest and the nights at their longest, when frost seemed to have reduced the living world to shrivelled waste, our ancestors gathered.
The turning of the year and the return of the sun’s warmth meant everything. Survival depended on it.
From the earliest Neolithic nomads sheltering beneath animal-skin tents on the lower hunting grounds beside the Coquet, to later Iron Age communities gathered within hillforts like Ros Castle, people came together.
They shared fire and food, stories of hunts and long summer days, the earliest communities bound as one, waiting for the light to return.
Time, regardless of the millennia that have passed, waited for no one. But the turning of the year offered reassurance: the tide would turn, the dark would recede, and life-giving light would return.
This was never invented as a religious event. It was the most natural observance imaginable, the rebirth of the sun, celebrated since the dawn of humanity.
The Romans marked this season with Saturnalia, itself inherited from older traditions of conquered peoples. Candles were lit against the dark. Gifts passed hand to hand. Laughter rose with the smoke. For a time, the world was turned upside down.
Here, skins painted blue, fires flickering around stone circles, blood sacrifice offered, ale shared, bodies joined in rapturous union, a reminder that life endured.
A celebration like no other, marking the return of the Sun, carried through the night until dawn broke on the shortest day of the year.
Then came Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, celebrating the moment when the sun began its slow, inevitable climb once more.
It is no coincidence that later faiths chose this exact moment to weave their own story.
Christianity did not replace these festivals; it overlaid them.
The birth of Christ was fixed not by scripture, but by convenience, deliberately placed at the height of Saturnalia, stitched into traditions already heavy with meaning.
Old gods were renamed, old fires relabelled, old truths quietly buried beneath new stories.
Yet the old gods lingered.
Closer to home, Cocidius, a native god of Britain, later adopted by Rome, walked the woods and rivers.
A god of war, wilderness, hunting and boundaries, later blended with Mars, he belonged to this land long before Rome arrived.
His name still flows in the waters of the Coquet itself.
As recently as the late 1800s, he was still honoured in secret.
At his shrine on the Otterburn moors, I stumbled upon a ritually altered red deer antler buried at the foot of his bas-relief quiet proof that belief does not vanish, it retreats.
What must the Romans in their finery, have thought of the skin-clad tribes they encountered here, faces painted blue, dancing in half-light around circles of stone?
They brought their own gods too.
Along the Wall, at places like Brocolitia, secret temples flourished. Mithras, born from stone, god of light and renewal, worshipped underground by soldiers who understood darkness intimately. Rituals held beneath the earth, mirroring the sun’s rebirth above it.
At Hartburn, the ground remembers. The Glebe, long attributed to the hands of Dr Sharpe, carries an older, quieter past.
A Mithraic presence, deliberate and hidden, where light and shadow meet.
At Warkworth, the hermitage carved into living rock speaks of something older than Christianity alone, a place chosen for threshold and transition.
The same kinds of places people have always returned to at this turning of the year.
Because, at heart, this season has never truly been about belief alone.
It has always been about who you are with, and where you are. It’s about the here, the now, living in the moment of change, when darkness gives way to light.
From the earliest fires on the hills, through Roman forts and hidden temples, to kitchen tables and hearths today, what has always mattered most is gathering with those you love.
Sharing what you have.
Marking that you have endured another turning of the year together.
No matter what you believe, or don’t, it is the company you keep, and the way you choose to celebrate, that gives this season its meaning.
So, wherever you are, and whoever you’re with, I wish you love, warmth, happiness and prosperity as the light turns back and a new year begins.
And remember to be kind, we never know what battles others are fighting in their heads or their lives.
SOL INVICTUS
With love from The Crasterfarian xx
Yule is also a very old word and concept, brought by the Anglo-Saxons from the Continent and full of symbolism that we still use at Christmas time.