How cozy Yuletide traditions got their start with raging parties and animal sacrifice

How cozy Yuletide traditions got their start with raging parties and animal sacrifice A family at their Victorian-era Christmas dinner, circa 1840. Hulton Archive/Hulton Archive hide caption toggle caption On a chilly December night in Sandy Spring, Md., dozens of people crammed into the Woodlawn Manor for a Victorian-era Yuletide dance lesson, the wood floors creaking under the uncertain steps of 21st-century people learning 19th-century English country dances. "Every good party has dancing," said Angela Yau, a historical interpreter for the parks department who was teaching the dances - and the Victorians loved a good Yuletide shindig. Angela Yau, a site manager for the Montgomery County parks department who also works in cultural and natural history interpretation, wears an 1840s-style dress while teaching Victorian dances to the room. Natalie Escobar/NPR hide caption toggle caption The merriment was emblematic of how many think of Yule; today, it's synonymous with Christmas. But centuries ago, before crooners sang about carols being sung by a fire, Yule meant something different: a pagan mid-winter festival around the solstice, dating back to pre-Christian Germanic people. It was particularly important to Scandinavian communities during that time of year, beset by late sunrises and early sunsets, according to Maren Johnson, a professor of Nordic studies at Luther College. "All these kinds of winter traditions are tied very intricately into small communities," she said. "You develop between yourselves a folklore about this winter time and this period of darkness." In this week's installment of "Word of the Week," we travel back in time to the origins of Yule festivals, and trace those earliest traditions to modern-day Christmas celebrations. Feasting, drinking and animal sacrifices Scholars of these early pagan festivals don't have much concrete evidence of what actually went on at them, according to Old Norse translator Jackson Crawford, because much of the written record comes much later from Christians. But what is clear, he said, was that feasting and drinking were abundant. Terry Gunnell, a professor of folkloristics at the University of Iceland, agrees. Drinking copious amounts of ale was not only encouraged but required, he said, and animals were slaughtered as part of the sacrifices to gods and spirits typical of these early festivals. "The snow is coming down the mountains and in a sense, the nature spirits are moving closer," he said - and people wanted to appease them. And then, there was the oath-swearing. Crawford said this was one of the major hallmarks of early Yule celebrations as recorded in myths like The Saga of Hervör and Heidrek from the 13th century. In it, a man swears to the king of Sweden that he'll marry his daughter with no real prospects of doing so. "But your oaths during Yule are kind of sacred, extra binding," he said. "So he has to try to fulfill it," even though he eventually gets killed. Crawford thinks that this oath-swearing could be where the word "Yule" actually comes from. The earliest roots could come from Indo-European words for "speaking," he...

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