Blessed Yule
Ironically, although the word "Christmas" is in the title, hardly any other song makes me think of Yule like this one. Especially Loreena McKennitt's sparse and echoing version on her album To Drive the Cold Winter Away. Sadly, I can't find this version anywhere online, other than an exerpt on her website. In high school, my parents and I lived in a farmhouse in the middle of the country. The downstairs of the house hadn't been lived in for ten years. The upstairs hadn't been lived in for thirty.
Once we got the upstairs inhabitable, I moved into the largest room of the house. But the catch was...there was no heat upstairs...not even a hole in the floor through which warm air could rise. The room was cavernous, echoing, and completely frigid. I would turn on this song on her beautiful and echoing album, and it would echo further around the bare wood floored - room, as I rubbed my numb nose above my piled up covers. I would stare at the lights of the Christmas tree (because my room was so huge and cold, I would buy my own Christmas tree every year and decorate it as a teen).
These memories are, to me, the embodiment of the longest night of the year.
In Praise of Christmas
All hail to the days that merit more praise
Than all of the rest of the year,
And welcome the nights that double delights
As well for the poor as the peer!
Good fortune attend each merry man's friend
That doth but the best that he may,
Forgetting old wrongs with carols and songs
To drive the cold winter away.
'Tis ill for a mind to anger inclined
To think of small injuries now,
If wrath be to seek, do not lend her thy cheek,
Nor let her inhabit thy brow.
Cross out thy books malevolent looks,
Both beauty and youth's decay,
And wholly consort with mirth and with sport
To drive the cold winter away.
This time of the year is spent in good cheer,
And neighbours together do meet,
To sit by the fire, with friendly desire,
Each other in love to greet.
Old grudges forgot are put in the pot,
All sorrows aside they lay;
The old and the young doth carol this song,
To drive the cold winter away.
When Christmas's tide comes in like a bride,
WIth holly and ivy clad,
Twelve days in the year much mirth and good cheer
In every household is had.
The country guise is then to devise
Some gambols of Christmas play,
Whereat the young men do best that they can
To drive the cold winter away.