Mastery Year 1: Part 7: Post 7: Yule

Please note that Yule took place the night of Friday, the21st into Saturday, the 22^nd,, so I’m writing this post a few days ahead of time. Hanuka had already completed a week earlier, which is why I don’t mention the holiday in the post, despite it being Hanuka now. So, happy Hanuka.

June had never celebrated Yule before, a strange thought, given how she’s embraced the particular brand of paganism popular here. I sometimes forget, now, that there are still things about this place and its culture she doesn’t know. Ironically, that makes it a little easier for me to keep the casual secrecy that renders so much around here a delightful surprise—I just assume she already knows what’s coming.

And so, June not only got to experience Yule for the first time, she got to do it without any warning from me about what it would be like. And I got to watch.

Yule dinner, as usual, was a quiet affair, there being only about thirty-five of us on campus this time of year, and ten of those 35 weren’t at dinner because Kit had scheduled her teaching coven’s ritual at the same time. Perhaps because Kit wasn’t there, Charlie showed up. We all sat together at the long, dark table in the Bird Room and he and Greg presided over the meal like the fathers of some very large family.

It was an odd meal, and not just because of Charlie’s company, but because we actually had Boar’s Head, a famously difficult thing to cook—it’s the Dish of Kings because only kings could afford to have it made. But Sadie can handle it, and had. She’d made us the dish once before, for Yule, but it’s not a common thing. It’s not simply the roasted head of a pig—it’s the skin of the head, with some of the facial bones for shape, stuffed with a mixture of pork, lamb, various organ meats, and, indeed, bays and rosemary, and then the whole thing roasted. It’s delicious.

Sadie didn’t eat with us—I imagine she was at the masters’ party upstairs—but, as I said, Greg and Charlie did, and when the dish was brought out, Charlie, who was in an unusually high-spirited mood, sang the Boar’s Head Carol in a rich, strong voice none of us had ever heard before. I’d heard him sing once, years ago, but then he’d been singing quietly, respectfully, not this boisterous celebration.

Afterwards, we all sat out by the lit tree and around the fire place and drank hot chocolate and mulled cider and talked in small groups. Charlie took his whistle out and played a few tunes, all of them seasonal and ancient sounding.

Then Kit and her people swept in, bearing the lit Yule Candle, and Charlie put his whistle away as though he’d never had it out. More than ten students had come in with Kit, as the coven had members who hadn’t been on campus earlier in the day. The pace of the party picked up. Someone unpacked a fiddle. More people started trickling in, hanging up cloaks on pegs to drip from the wet, sleety snow falling outside.

“I thought we were going to bed early so we could watch the sunrise, or something?” asked June.

“You can go to bed, if you want,” I said.

“Not a chance,” she replied, and went to go pour herself some eggnog that had appeared from somewhere while nobody was looking.

I spotted Charlie sitting off by himself, looking as though he worried it might rain on his head. I joined him.

“Getting a bit noisy for you, isn’t it?” I asked.

“These things were more fun back when I was drinking,” he said, with a trace of his old growl.

“I do not drink...wine,” I said, in my best Dracula accent. He laughed.

“I suppose there are compulsions worse than mine,” he admitted. “I suppose I would have gotten tired of partying by now, anyway, even if I were still drinking. If I’d lasted this long.”

“Do you miss drinking?” I asked, amazed to find him so willing to talk.

“I miss being young,” he replied. “Being a young drunk has its perks. Being an old drunk….I doubt I’d like it.”

“Charlie, I can’t picture you as a young man, going to parties.”

“I used to do a lot of things you’ve never seen me do, Daniel.” He winced as the volume of the music increased.

“Why are you at this party,” I asked. “I mean, I’m glad to see you, but….”

“Occupational hazard of living in a community, Daniel. I like people, contrary to popular opinion. I like some social contact. But around here, when I find any people, there’s usually a whole pile of them.”

A pile of people was right, for they kept coming. Senior students and candidates and recent graduates, many of them carrying instruments. We pushed the furniture back and the evening evolved into a dance party. I saw Charlie talking to a few other people, enjoying himself, in his own way, even laughing, but after a while I didn’t see him anymore. He’d slipped out while nobody was looking. I remember June, slightly tipsy, laughing hysterically, I’m not sure what about. Was I tipsy, too? I can’t remember. Is that a bad sign? Maybe I was just tired and silly. I wasn’t drinking that much.

Around three AM, the snow stopped. We could hear the wind whistling around the corners on the Mansion and the branches of the elm on the east side. Rick came in from a walk (he doesn’t like piles of people, either) and reported that the temperature was dropping.

“We’re going to dance the sun up, aren’t we?” asked June.

“That depends,” I told her. “Do you want to dance?”

She laughed and threw her arms around my neck and I really liked that. We danced for a while.

Around six in the morning—the world outside the window still looking as dark as ever—some of the senior students took charge of organizing the trip up the mountain in silence to see the sunrise. How were these students chosen? When I was a senior novice, no one ever asked me if I wanted to perform that duty.

“I thought we were dancing the sun up?” said June.

“You can dance your way up the mountain,” I told her.

She didn’t, especially. We actually got separated in the dark, on the way up, the snow crunching under our feet, the stars bright and the air cold. Up on the mountain, we found each other in the dark, and she sat on my lap and I wrapped her in my cloaks and we kept each other warm.

The sun came up and the masters sang and played and the world turned gold and pink and white.

When we got back to the Geat Hall, the Sprouts and some of their other family members (including, to my surprise, my brother and his kids) had arrived and transformed the place, filling the room with bowls of chocolates and candied fruit and nuts and oranges, and setting our gift bags here and there, and readying steaming pots of hot chocolate, coffee, and mulled cider, oatmeal and miso soup.

We spent the day playing and eating and more or less being unusually tall kids and June asked me why we’d never celebrated Yule on our own when we were in grad school—why hadn’t I introduced us to this?

Of course, for most of my Absence, I spent the holiday season, including the solstice, with my parents, not with June. But I didn’t celebrate Yule while I was away. I kept forgetting. I’d mean to, and then realize it was yesterday. There was no community.

I missed it here.