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successfully banned Christmas throughout England. American Puritan preacher Increase Mather, father to fun-loving and witch-hating Cotton, characterized Christmas as an exclusively pagan holiday unfit for Christians.
Maya White Sparks is all too familiar with the darker history of Christmas. Her Spiral Grove, a “not-forprofit, inter-faith, earth-centered spiritual community celebrating nature holidays,” represents a wide array of beliefs and believers. United by a shared reverence for nature, Spiral Grove’s members are a voice for those traditions either oppressed or eliminated through a series of historical misfortunes: Goddess religions, Wicca, Druidism and Native American beliefs, to name a few.
Many of Spiral Grove’s members — from Fauquier and surrounding counties — have family members who celebrate the traditional holidays, said White Sparks. “So our group ends up doing both.”
Rather than focus on one particular day, White Sparks said, “Our approach is to connect with the natural forces that are present as we go around the wheel of the year.” This same wheel called rol in Scandinavian, Celtic and Teutonic cultures refers to the changing seasons and is the basis for the word “Yule.”
Connecting to the wheel, rol or Yule in winter requires a celebration of the Winter Solstice.
“On a natural level, it’s the longest
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