I’m sure that most of us who have fireplaces have fantasized about being able to celebrate the Christmas Holiday Season with a traditional Yule log. Those of you who have actual working fireplaces, might well do exactly that or have your own special Christmas traditions around the fires in your places.
To be clear, our fireplaces today are tiny little nooks compared to the size of the fireplaces that homes had back when this tradition was started. Three or four grown men could stand upright in some of those fireplaces and entire houses were heated by the fires that sat upon those hearths. For comparison, the fireplace in my apartment holds 3 pillar candles side by side. Four pillar candles would burn the house down.
There are cultures today that situate a large log in a central (and safe) gathering spot in their community, that they slowly burn over a number of days and throughout their mid-winter festivities, to unite and encourage each other. Some have ceremonies to sprinkle the log with wine or to add food or foliage to the log for luck before it is set alight. One tradition is to sprinkle the burning log with salt in order to keep witches away. I can’t imagine how that would work.
Trees have always been valued, so it isn’t too surprising that the first record of a prized Christmas-related log came to us out of a German manuscript written way back in 1184–four centuries before we find the first references to our present day non-burning Christmas trees. Another early written account about special Christmas logs being part of the custom, came out of Dubrovnik in 1272. That account tells a tale of ship masters and sailors lugging a large log to whoever was the Top Dog in town. The write-up adds that they were rewarded with 2 gold coins and some booze. Each?
There was a charming description included in a poetry collection by English poet Robert Herrick in 1648, in which he describes having a large Christmas log brought straight into a farmhouse by ‘cheering lads’, after which they were rewarded with alcohol. Not a wonder that they were cheering, is it? (And let’s just assume that ‘lads’ were older back then than they are today.) A couple of years after this published account, the term “Yule log” started to be used in place of the words “Christmas log”, and the name just seemed to stick.
In Ireland the phrase they used for a Yule log translates into Christmas Block. In Scotland “Yeel Carline” translated into The Christmas Old Wife. (Had Santa brought each Scot a new wife?) The Welsh had a term that just used consonants and a couple of y’s, which translated into Festival Block. Nothing to do with setting fire to your Old Wife. I like that.
There were always superstitions or observed protocols surrounding the burning of the Yule log and by the 20th century most agreed that the Yule log needed to be put immediately into the fireplace upon delivery and promptly lit, in order to ward off great misfortune. Here on the West Coast, we don’t try to light wood that has just been outside, but clearly those were different times.
Not being able to keep the Yule log lit, or at least smoldering, throughout the 12 days of Christmas (until January 6th), sentenced the household to bad luck for the entire year ahead. That’s a bit too intense for the Holidays, if you ask me.
One lovely tradition was to tuck away a piece of one year’s Yule log, while the rest was burned up completely, and then use that stick to light the Yule log the next Christmas. That simple act was meant to symbolize continuity or the bond between the generations. Nice, right?
By the 18th century in France, a rolled sponge cake with buttercream icing had somehow assumed the same moniker used for a tree that one burned in their fireplace for 12 days, but it wasn’t until after World War II that the French Yule log cake really took off. Nowadays, these edible namesakes are available all season long, from every lowly grocery store to the most elegant of restaurants.
Interestingly, the first ever Yule log burning ‘show’ on TV was in 1966, if you can believe that. It was broadcast on a station out of New York City that looped a 17 second film they had taken of a roaring fire in the fireplace of the mayoral residence. They moved the decorative fire screen aside in order to get the unobstructed view of what we all think we want to see. This snippet of film was played on steady rotation (set against a background of easy listening Holiday tunes) from 9:30pm on Christmas Eve, straight on through Christmas Day, so that the station’s staff could have the day off to spend with their families. It turned out to be a big, if not quirky, hit. In fact, by 1970 they had worn out the 16mm film that the ‘show’ had been recorded on (that’s how things were done back then, kids) but the mayor wouldn’t let them use his fireplace to re-record the piece. That was likely due to the fact that a stray ember had leapt out of the fireplace during the first filming (sans fire screen) and had burned a hole in an antique rug to the tune of $4000 in damages. The station was able to find another fireplace with a higher tolerance level and recorded the same bit in order to continue on with the now-demanded Holiday feature. That original 1966 film is still available to watch on Youtube if you can’t get to sleep some night.
During this Christmas Season, I hope that you will be able to either light your own Yule log (in a firesafe place!) or snag a piece of rolled sponge cake and tune into a TV channel or website offering their version of the original Yule log burning scene. And even if we don’t exactly follow the same traditions as our forebearers, as you enjoy your own version of a Yule log this Christmas, I’d like to offer you the uplifting sentiments that have surrounded this practice for centuries:
May you find Light, Warmth, Hope, and Renewal throughout this Holiday Season and may those tidings follow each of you into the New Year!
Merry Christmas!
