What I Learned From Yule Logs About Making It Last
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The Yule log was never just a cute tradition. It was a practical, vital fire that stretched through the long dark. How do we keep the echo burning? Welcome to What I Learned From… “And of course there is the chocolate- the Yule log cooling in the kitchen; the nougatines, the celestines, the chocolate truffles piled onto the counter in a fragrant scatter of cocoa dust.” — Joanne Harris, The Girl with No Shadow What I Learned From …I started looking up the history of the Yule log and immediately got distracted by cake. Nope, it wasn't the deep ancient history. It was chocolate spirals and glossy bark frosting. Photos that all look the same if you scroll too fast, but somehow have their own distinct flair with their various decorations. There was also the one they lit on fire. Then the fireplace videos. Hours-long loops of logs burning on televisions, which I vaguely remember being a thing when I was a kid, and now seem to exist in infinite variations online. Some cozy and some aggressively cozy. Some very clearly not real fires at all. This all felt relevant, somehow. When you live far enough north, winter stops feeling symbolic. In Aberdeen, Scotland, I used to walk to my office space at 8-9AM as dawn was breaking, and I'd watch the sun set out the window at 3PM. That does something to your sense of time. You start noticing what lasts and understanding what people cling to. You notice the lights and the fire. Maybe now that I’ve mentioned it, you’ll see it too. How often fire shows up at this time of year, and how specific the rituals around it tend to be. Not just candles or a nice warm glow, but something that keeps going while everything else feels stalled and frozen. That’s where the Yule log really starts tugging at me. Not as a cute tradition, or a seasonal aesthetic, but as a very practical decision people made when winter was long and dark and not especially forgiving. But the more I read, the more uneven the story gets. They use different types of wood in different places. Birch in Scotland. Oak in England. Cherry in France. There might have been bonfires, perhaps parties where the whole family would gather to saw down a towering timber, and there were definitely Christmas Eves at the hearth with a single log and carol singing over Glühwein. Once you start following the paper trail, a lot of what we confidently say about the Yule log comes from the places and periods where someone bothered to write it down. Whether it was medieval records or legal documents about who was allowed to take what wood from which forest…the practice looks "way more tidy and proper" once it has a name, a date, and a margin note. These details shift depending on who is telling the story. I keep catching myself bristling at how easily everything north and dark and pre-Christian gets folded into the same "unverifiable" label, as if Scandinavia, the Celtic Isles, and the rest of northern Europe were all living in an actual Dark Age, void of any meaning and culture. And we won’t even mention the way that holidays of light like Hanukkah and Diwali are left out of it totally. As if the absence of written records means the absence of ritual. That seems pretty frickin' unlikely, don't ya think? So, back to the log. This wasn't some hunk of wood you tossed on the fire and forgot about. It was chosen carefully, dragged home with effort, and burned slowly, often over several days. In some places, it was fed a little at a time. In others, it stayed where it was, sticking out into the room because half a tree is a really big log to put in a fireplace, and you worked around it. And when it finally burned down, people didn’t just throw away what was left like it was trash to be wasted. The ashes were saved. Some of it went back into the soil and some of it stayed close. They'd take the charred remains and leave it under a bed or by the door, protecting them from storms and lightning (which, ironically, could cause their house to burn down in a fire!) The fire from a Yule log didn’t just warm the house for a night, it stretched forward into the year. Which makes the modern versions feel less silly than they first appear. That cake that they started to make when homes downsized their fireplaces? The ribboned and bedazzled perfectly cut log with holes for taper candles that you place on the table? The endlessly crackling video playing in the background while everything outside stays trapped in the darkness. Obviously they aren't the same thing, but they might be the closest available echo we've got. A reminder to keep something burning, even when the old hearths are gone. You don’t torch your Yule log all at once. You tend to it, and you let it last. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
Freshly Forged …What's new, what's coming, and how to be part of it.
The Forge at CYC is cooling through January, while I bring together everything that’s been taking shape in my solo-flame time. I’ll share updates as soon as things are ready to strike. Thanks for holding the space while I make sure ours is set to glow. Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. “I talk about the things people have always talked about in stories: pain, hate, truth, courage, destiny, friendship, responsibility, growing old, growing up, falling in love, all of these things. What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads. I try to go into those places in me that contain the cauldrous. I want to dip up the fire, and I want to put it on paper. The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.” — Harlan Ellison Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week’s essay. Use it to write your own. Pick a tradition you used to roll your eyes at (maybe for being fussy, boring, or just plain weird.) What was the deeply practical, possibly grumpy, human problem it was invented to solve? Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Bavin [BAV-in] (n.) — A bundle of brushwood or small sticks, used specifically as kindling to start or sustain a fire. From Middle English, but now obsolete, its obscure origins may link to Old French "baffe" (a blow or strike), while others note possible links to Gaelic or Irish "baban" (a tuft or small bundle.) A bavin is not the grand log, but the unglamorous fuel meant to keep a hearth going gently rather than blazing brightly. Sorta synonyms: kindling, touchwood, tinder Use it for: your daily word count or minutes written; all those links and clips of research; the gathered rituals that sustain a long creative winter. Want to read more in-depth Glossary entries? Catch up on the archives and find this week’s newest one. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Ever wondered what street your 19th-century character would have turned down, or what that forest looked like when they were felling a tree for the solstice burn? Old Maps Online lets you time-travel through cartography, turning "What was here then?" from a question into the start of your setting. The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. No, you started researching the historic origins of holiday tradition and got sidetracked immediately by cake. ‘Til next time ~ Elisa PS: My email provider thinks we’re not that close. Rude. A quick reply (even just “Fire!” without the crowded building) tells Kit we’re besties and gets this newsletter in front of more frozen eyeballs. Help a hearth out? |