Did you know there is a super secret side of Christmas baking? There is and Linda Raedisch is here to tell us all about it!
In part two, Ellen Evert Hopman talks to us about the sacred herbs of the holiday season.
You can find their books at Amazon:
The Secret History of Christmas Baking: Recipes & Stories from Tomb Offerings to Gingerbread Boys – https://amzn.to/48qM9cA
The Sacred Herbs of Yule and Christmas: Remedies, Recipes, Magic, and Brews for the Winter Season – https://amzn.to/49btEt4
Thanks Linda & Ellen!
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Jim:
We’ve got a big Christmas show coming up next on the Paranormal Podcast.
Speaker 2:
This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.
Jim:
Welcome to the Paranormal Podcast. I am Jim Harold. So glad to be with you once again and Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everybody listening, and we’ve got a great Christmas show for you today. In the second part of the show, we have Ellen Evert Hopman, and she’s going to talk about the sacred herbs of Yule and Christmas. And did you know there’s a secret history of Christmas baking? Well, indeed there is. And you’re about ready to find out about it right now.
I love this time of the year. One thing I don’t love though is trying to find books that fit the theme of the show and fit this season of the year. But we’ve got a great one because we’re going to talk about secret history, specifically The Secret History of Christmas Baking: Recipes and Stories from Tomb Offerings to Gingerbread Boys. And our guest is Linda Raedisch, and we are so glad to have her. She has been contributing crafts, recipes, and ethnobotanical lore to Llewellyn’s Herbal Almanac since 2012. She’s the author of The Old Magic of Christmas and the Lore of Old Elfand. Outside the kitchen she has special interests in paper crafts, minority languages, and exploring the suburban jungle. You can follow her culinary crafting and linguistic adventures on Instagram at Linda Raedisch. Linda, welcome to the show and happy holidays to you.
Linda Raedisch:
Hi, thank you. Happy holidays to you too. I’m happy to be here.
Jim:
So this new book, it just came out in September, the Secret History of Christmas Baking. Now to me, I think of chocolate chip cookies and cakes and sugar cookies and the shape of Christmas trees and things, but it sounds like there’s a lot more to it than that. Have I underestimated Christmas baking all my life? Is there a lot more behind this secret history?
Linda Raedisch:
Yes, you have absolutely underestimated it, but that’s not uncommon in America. In our house we had, it was sort of an unspoken rule that no one would bake or buy chocolate chip cookies during December because my mom is from Germany and there were so many other cookies, Christmas cookies that you’re supposed to be eating and baking. And her boss, who was American, used to give – his wife would bake a cookie plate for everybody in the department, and she would come home with this American Christmas cookie plate, and there would be sugar cookies and chocolate chip cookies, which I was really happy to see because at that time I had gotten kind of tired of the traditional lebkuchen and stroops, all different things that she made that were spicy and had fruits and nuts. And sometimes I did just want to bite into a chocolate chip cookie. But yeah, the American Christmas baking tradition is – recipes are kind of like genetics. Okay, so Sub-Saharan Africa is where you have the biggest genetic diversity of people.
And then as we all moved out of Africa, bringing just one little parcel of DNA out with us, it thinned out. So the further you get to the fringes, the less genetic diversity you have. So in America, we’re kind of at the fringes of many culinary traditions. So German immigrants came and they brought a certain kind of gingerbread that they kept baking there. We have some Italian Christmas cookies, but it’s not, then you go back to Germany, you go back to Italy or Poland or Scandinavia, and then it’s like, oh, there’s all these back to the heartland, the culinary heartland. There’s all this variety and more ingredients, but we’ve also lost it through time. If you look at the cookbooks, early American cookbooks, there’s a lot more going on there. There’s a lot more diversity of ingredients. And I would like to see non-Americans, not for them to go back to baking like Europeans, which they can.
And there’s lots of European recipes in the book. But also to go back, let’s look at our own history. What was coming out of the early American kitchens? What part was it recipes that they brought from the old world? What part was it adaptations that they had to make because there was ingredients that they couldn’t get from the old world and there was new world ingredients that, oh, now we’ve got them and they don’t have them in Europe. So I think there is a lot to be explored in American baking and just culinary tradition in general.
Jim:
Now I think of you harken back to the chocolate chip cookies and I think about sitting around a fire with some cocoa and listening to Nat King Cole sing the Christmas song and eating chocolate chip cookies. It’s also kind of wholesome and sweet. But were there any more kind of sinister or spooky origins of any Christmas baking or any items that we’ve come to know or maybe not know
Linda Raedisch:
Sinister more than spooky. Sinister. Well, you go to the chocolates that’s in your chocolate chip cookies. Do you know where, most people don’t know really where chocolate comes from.
Jim:
They come from, is it beans? I’m really ignorant about beans.
Linda Raedisch:
Yeah, from where geographically, not everybody knows that it’s a new world food. And it was first cultivated in Mexico, Costa Rica, Costa Rica may have been where it was first cultivated. And native peoples in Central America often still regard it as a sacred food. And they had their own traditions around it. When I first discovered this as a teenager, I made my family called Aztec brownies because the Aztecs didn’t have, until the Spaniard came, no sugar, just honey was the only sweetener. So I tried, I made these really dark brownies with honey, a little bit of honey instead of sugar. And they were not good. And I’ve always been fascinated, like where And Aztec warriors, I had read somewhere Aztec warriors drank cocoa before going into the battle because it made them strong. So okay, I’m going to make brownies like that. And there was a whole ritual and they put crazy stuff. Well, we think crazy stuff in their cocoa, they didn’t have dairy cattle, so there was no milk to put in it, but they put honey, cornmeal, allspice. I’ve got a whole thing about allspice and its connection to the dead that the have the Maya, there was a correlation between allspice and chocolate and the dead. And so that’s not so much sinister. It’s interesting when you get to sinister is when you get to the sugar, and sugar is one of the worst things that’s ever happened to anybody.
Jim:
Yeah, I mean I love stuff, but it’s not good for you.
Linda Raedisch:
It’s not good for us. It’s not good for us. And when I started to research sugar and I put it into my library’s online catalog, I’m getting all these books about why not to eat it, how not to eat it, what to eat instead of it. But I really wanted to know is how did it become such a big part of our diets and where did it come from originally? I’d kind of known because I had read Dorothy Dunnett historical author. She wrote a series of books called The House of Nicolo about a Flemish merchant who goes out adventuring and trading and they’ve got some sugar plantations in the Mediterranean. And so I kind of trade new, I knew there, I knew there were sugar plantations in the Mediterranean, late 1400s. And I traced it back to the Arab world, from the Arab world to India, from India to New Guinea. So sugar actually originally comes from New Guinea and they New Guineans were okay with it. There were different kinds of sugarcane. Some you would use at your house, some you would use to feed your pigs and some you would just chew on because it was sweet. And probably if that’s all the sugar that you’re eating, it’s okay.
But somewhere between there and the Mediterranean started to get out of hand and that was all we wanted to eat. And then it was difficult to grow in the Arab world because most of it, north Africa, islands in the Mediterranean, is arid and sugar really likes a tropical environment, likes moisture. So then they found when they Europeans discovered the Caribbean, the islands in the Caribbean, warm and moist, and there were West Africans who had learned from the Arabs or had already been slaves to in the Arab world, knew how to process the sugar. You move them over there onto the islands and the rest is basically tragic history.
Jim:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you think about the origins of some of the things that we enjoy, not a good history,
Linda Raedisch:
And we wouldn’t have zombies. We wouldn’t have zombies without sugar. Zombies are born of the sugar industry.
Jim:
Interesting.
Linda Raedisch:
And I’m often saying that yeah, the zombie really is a tragic figure. It came out of Caribbean, especially Haitian folklore. But the Haitian folk are really reflected the real, the reality of you’re taken from your home in West Africa, you’re put in a coffin like hold, you’re let out on the island of Haiti and your purpose is only to work until you drop dead.
Jim:
Horrible stuff. Absolutely terrible. Absolutely terrible. What about other things other than sugar? What other ingredients have an interesting if maybe disturbing or not disturbing history?
Linda Raedisch:
Yeah, so many of them, a lot of us take for granted the spices in our spice cabinet and don’t replace them as often as we should, which we can because they’re no longer nearly as expensive as they were in the middle Ages when it could take a year for the spice to get from the island in the Pacific where it was grown to a market in say, Flanders or Germany or England. American sugar cookies are just that. There’s no spice in sugar cookie. There is vanilla in sugar cookies, which is also from Mexico, and that has a lot of stories attached to it too. But yeah, most people that cinnamon, maybe ginger, they’re making gingerbread, so ginger, but all spice, nutmeg, mace, which is kind of sort of the same thing as nutmeg because it comes from the same plants and it’s coriander, black pepper.
There’s a lot of cookies in Northern Europe, Christmas cookies that have pepper in the name, but not in the ingredients. So the question is why did they once have pepper? In the Martin Luther, the reformer church reformer, he did not approve of black pepper because it was just too, I guess it was too spicy, it was too luxurious. So it may be in those countries that went, those principalities that became Protestant, they, oh, quick take the black pepper out. We’re not doing that anymore. Or it could have been that pepper was, since pepper was the most popular spice and most widely used spice, it just meant spice. It was just a synonym for spice. So it’s just the names of all of ’em. Some people think allspice is all spices. It’s not actually all spices, it’s just one spice and it’s the berry of a tree that grows in the Caribbean, and that’s still where we get our allspice.
Jim:
Interesting. Very interesting. Is there a fun kind of factoid or something that you found that was maybe a more delightful surprise?
Linda Raedisch:
Oh yes, yes. So the book is not all doom and gloom, be assured. I think my favorite part researching and writing was the Befana Regatta in Venice, which takes place on epiphany, which is January 6th. And so Befana is an Italian Christmas witch. She delivers the presents on January 6th or the eve of January 6th. She drops, she flies on her broomstick and she drops ’em down the chimney because she’s looking for the Christ child. She’s been all these 2000 years, she’s been looking for the Christ child. So she just drops toys and presents down any chimney just in case he happens to be living there. If you’ve been bad, you’ll get a thing that, a sweet that looks like coal. It’s a candy made of sugar, and that’s colored black. But Venice has, it’s a much more recent tradition, late 20th century tradition, where they have a regatta. They wear these, the Befana witches row from one spot in Venice, I can’t remember, I think they end up on the Rialto Bridge. And they have a race and they’re dressed as witches. And so that you know that it’s Befana’s boat, they put their broomsticks, tie their broomsticks to the prow with the bristles up. And the best thing about it is that in order to participate in this race, you have to be over 50 and you have to be a man.
So you have a bunch of middle-aged men in shawls and dressed as witches. And the kind of boat that they’re rowing is traditionally only rode by women and girls, only women and girls racing it. So it’s just a delightful tradition to have middle-aged men dress as Christmas witches rowing for all they’re worth. And then the prize is just you get to drink a glass of wine and have some cookies when you get there. And there’s the glory, of course. But even during the corona lockdown, there couldn’t be any spectators. But the guys, they got out there and they raced anyway.
Jim:
Wow. That’s cool. That’s cool. The show must go on kind of attitude. That’s awesome.
Linda Raedisch:
Yep.
Jim:
What a fascinating discussion. And we’ll be right back to this special Christmas edition of the Paranormal podcast after this
Announcer:
Merry Christmas and happy holidays from the spooky studio. Now back to the Paranormal Podcast.
Jim:
You mentioned witches. Are there any holiday treats that are associated with witches, whether knowingly, other than the one that you mentioned, either knowingly or unknowingly, things that we might be surprised?
Linda Raedisch:
Okay, so it’s been a year now since I actually finished writing the book, more than a year since I finished the writing. The book, the Lucia buns have a sort of tenuous, iffy association with witches. They’re baked traditionally in Sweden on December thirteenth, which at one time there was the switch from the old Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. And dates were shifted and moved around. And at one time the winter solstice fell on December 13th. So it’s a solstice holiday originally, but it’s now very Christianized – St. Lucia is a Christian saint. And it carried through, really didn’t actually get going until Protestant Times. But there is also, other than St. Lucy, there seems to be an older Lucy who was a witch and she was a part of the Wild Hunt, which is a tribe of restless spirits that rambles through the landscape at that time of year in the weeks leading up to Christmas. And will sometimes come and ransack your cellars, drink your wine, raid your larder, and then move on. So it seems these buns might have been offerings to that older witchy Lucy.
Jim:
Now is there, as we talked about, the standard American palate of treats and baking is somewhat limited. Although, I mean, for example, my wife is Italian and they have a whole other bunch of things that come from that tradition like bacala, and there’s something she does, it’s like a fried dough. It’s almost like a donut that she does, I forget what it’s called, but it’s delicious. But as kind of your kind of a non-ethnically specific American, I never grew up with that. I always grew up with the, not that they’re bland. I love chocolate chip cookies, I love the sugar cookies and the basic stuff. I love all that and I don’t want to poop-poo that. That’s great and that’s fun. But I didn’t have a wide palette being married to her my palate has increased along with my waistline. But the point being, are there some really great treats that you got to maybe personally sample or experience through doing this book that you’re like, man, we’re really missing the boat on? Just in terms of just sheer enjoyment,
Linda Raedisch:
I really got deep into lebkuchen, which my mother made growing up. She made it as a bar cookie. It’s baking soda–levened, it’s more cake-like. She would make it in bars and sometimes she would put chocolate chips on top when it came out of the oven, when the sheet came out of the oven, spread chocolate chips and cut it and had this nice chocolate topping. So she worked full time, so she was into the shortcuts. So I do include her recipe with the little tweaks from me. And I was never wild about it. I think I didn’t like the strong honey taste because I was a kid growing up in America. I was raised on broken cookies when my father, he had a string of gas stations, and at one of them there was a bakery up the street, and I don’t know if he got them for free or just wildly discounted, but he would come home with these pink boxes of broken cookies.
We called them because the cookies were broken. It was one that the bakery couldn’t sell. And it was those ones where it’s kind of like a star shaped sugar cookie, I think like a rosette shaped sugar cookie. And then jelly, red jelly in the middle. And it was years before I realized that the jelly is not supposed to be, it’s not supposed to be like rock hard and stick to your teeth when you bite into it, because that’s how it always was, when by the time we got them, I think they were broken and stale cookies, it’s probably an Italian bakery. So I grew up with, I grew loving sugar cookies, loving chocolate chip cookies, thinking what my mother made was a little bit weird. And so the lebkuchen with the honey and the spices, I was not too into. But then when I started researching this, researching gingerbread and lebkuchen and the common origins, I really wanted to make what I think of as the quintessential lebkuchen, which is Elisenlebkuchen, it’s usually translated as gingerbread, even though it’s questionable whether or not it actually has ginger in it. And I really got into it, making the pan, make my own marzipan that goes into the dough, apricot jam goes into the dough, and just playing around with what could the secret spice be? Could it in fact be ginger? Even though my mother says no, there should not be ginger in lebkuchen, I think there might actually be the Nurnberger bakers who are the most famous lebkuchen makers, at least they don’t cop to ginger. They reveal more of the spices and the fist is a secret.
So I, could it be pepper, could it be ginger? Could it even be cumin, which was a popular spice in ancient Egypt. And a lot of our spices first, no matter where they were coming from, they first came through Alexandria in Egypt because that’s where the Arab Empire had their headquarters. And then the Venetians later had an outpost there. So I’m wondering, could it be cumin?
Jim:
Interesting. Did gingerbread cookies have their origin in Egypt?
Linda Raedisch:
Kind of sort of yes and no? The Egyptians did bake. They had a very high artistic baking tradition. They made all kinds of breads. They made fancy shapes. And there is a recipe in there which there’s a book called An Ancient Egyptian Herbal by Lisa Manniche, and I don’t know if I’m pronouncing her name right, she’s Danish, a Danish Egyptologist. And she kind of sketched out a bit of a recipe because there was this Rekmire, he was a vizier and he was in charge of the royal bakery, and there are paintings on his tomb wall of the baking of these cakes that were made with tiger nut flour. So I fleshed out her recipe and I thought, let me see, make them sort of as if they were lebkuchen, but using only those ingredients that an ancient Egyptian baker would have. So with tiger nuts and some hazelnuts, because they had access to those, cumin, I’m trying to remember all now what, only honey, not sugar. There was no sugar processing up and running in ancient Egypt. And I brought them into work and one of my coworkers was brave enough to try one. They’re a little bit suspicious of what I bring in because they too have very American palates. And she liked it, .T that kind of, if you take the Egyptian tiger nut cake and you pat it down into a disc, you kind of have the typical German lebkuchen.
Jim:
Interesting.
Linda Raedisch:
And we know that there was, because during the Roman era, there was a lot of traffic between Egypt and the Roman world, and then the Romans came up into the Alps, and you also had Jews living throughout the Roman Empire. And then I think I call, I propose a stalwart Jewish trader working his way up beyond the limits of the Roman Empire, up to Cologne, up into the Alps, because we know that Jewish bakers were baking gingerbread in Nuremberg, Germany, what’s now Germany in the 1400s. And so possibly, possibly even earlier.
Jim:
It is amazing how it all blends together. Go ahead, I’m sorry.
Linda Raedisch:
Yeah, yeah. So it’s not proven that gingerbread comes from ancient Egypt. It’s probably stretching it, but it’s also when you trace these recipes back, even a simple gingerbread man, he doesn’t have only one origin story. He has a lot of different recipes coming together.
Jim:
Yeah, that’s kind of neat though. I mean, it just goes to show that we all come from a common root, and we’re all, our cultures, whether we realize it or not, are influenced by one another, which I think is a pretty cool thing. Now, let me ask you this. I think in the book you mentioned that cookies at one point were thought of kind of like pharmaceuticals?
Linda Raedisch:
Yeah, yeah. We have St. Thomas Aquinas to thank for the whole Christmas baking tradition because you know how now acai berries are kind of all the rage and for a while quinoa was, anything that comes from that’s exotic to us, oh, this is really good for you, goji berries, this is really good for you. Anything we didn’t grow up with, we discovered from somewhere else. Okay, that’s a health food. And it was the same way in Mediaeval Europe, almonds were exotic. They were grown along the Rhine for a while, but mostly they had to be imported. They originally came, probably first domesticated in Persia. Pretty much most of our fruits and vegetables were first domesticated in Persia. Most of our spices come from Southeast Asia and India. And so these were exotic things. And also sugar. Sugar was very expensive when it first made its way into Europe.
It wasn’t nearly as refined as what we have now. And if you wanted sugar, you would go to the apothecary. He would also have marzipan, and he would be making these things. He would be compounding marzipan, which is basically almonds, rosewater, bitter almond oil, which is poisonous if you have too much of it, and sugar. And he would compound this using these old physicians’ recipe books, which originally were written in the Arab world. And some were then also translated from ancient Greek medical treatises translated into Arabic and then translated into Latin. And so because these marzipan, rosewater, orange flower water, oranges, any spices were considered medicinal, like good for settling the stomach, especially for children. They were given to children. Molasses was given to children to settle the stomach. And this is the time when most people have intestinal parasites. So there is some coriander, cumin, these are good things for the stomach. So because these were prescribed by the apothecary, you could eat them during advent, which is the four weeks leading up to Christmas, which in the Middle Ages was a Lenten season, meaning you’re supposed to be fasting. You’re not supposed to be eating meat and dairy and luxurious foods, but you can eat medicinal foods. And that is why one of the reasons why the Gingerbread man is a Christmas food today, because you could get around the old Catholic prohibitions against indulging, because gingerbread is good for the digestion.
Jim:
Yeah, that’s interesting. That’s interesting. So as we close this out, is there one favorite anecdote or something that you learned that surprised you or something that really stands out when you say, I did this book and I found X and Boy, was that a highlight? Maybe we’ve mentioned it, but if there’s something else that comes to mind.
Linda Raedisch:
Well, there were a lot of, I think of them as in this little gifts along the way when I’m researching something and you just step find something that’s just exactly the kind of story that you want to include in a book like this. And one was when I was researching the Sienese Panforte. And so gingerbread has some… is it a cake? Is it a cookie? Is it a candy, even? Because when you’re tracing it back down to the Mediterranean, when you get to Italy, their spicy Christmas dessert is Panforte, which is, it’s very sticky, it’s very chewy nuts, honey, spices. And that traced back to there was, I’m trying to remember what city it was. It was possibly near Pompeii? But the Romans believed that the Nucato, which is like what we now call Panforte, this sticky honey nut mixture, they traced it back to this pagan tribe who used to meet under a sacred walnut tree.
And because they held onto their paganism so long, they were a non-Roman tribe because not everybody in Roman empire, even in Italy, were Roman. These I think were the Sam Knights. They stayed pagan longer. They were devotees of the cult of Isis that was exported from Egypt. And because they stayed in their pagan ways, their area was known as the City of Witches, and they were credited with coming up with this, the first one to come up with this confection of honey and nuts, which is now the main Italian Christmas dessert of Panforte. So I met a lot of witches in the research that I didn’t expect to find and where I didn’t expect to find them.
Jim:
Very interesting indeed. Well, Linda, it’s been really interesting and I hope that people will pick up the book and add some new traditions to their current traditions in terms of Christmas baking. Where can people find the book and more information about everything you do?
Linda Raedisch:
So the book, they can get it, order it directly from Llewellyn. Pretty much most online booksellers have it. I’m trying to think what else. Yeah, I would stop by Llewellyn first and then just whatever, wherever you like to buy books online, see if they have it. Most do. And yeah, and I hope that people will get a little bit adventurous with their Christmas baking.
Jim:
Linda, thanks for being on the show today and happy holidays to you.
Linda Raedisch:
You too. Thanks for having me.
Jim:
A secret history of Christmas Baking, who knew, but a great discussion. We appreciate Linda.
And next up we’re going to talk about Sacred Christmas Herbs with Ellen Evert Hopman right after this. This program’s brought to you by My Paranormal Plus Club and Spooky Studio Plus. Now, many of you know that I have a Plus Club. That’s where you can hear all of the interviews we’ve done. going back to 2005, all of the Campfire episodes, all of the exclusive shows, we do eight of those a month just for our Plus Club listeners. And you can’t get it unless you are a member of the Plus Club. To find out how, go to jimharoldplus.com, click on the banner, all the details will be there. There are two different versions. There is the Apple Podcast version, which is for people who listen just on their Apple devices, specifically in the Apple Podcasts app.
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Announcer:
You are listening to the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.
Jim:
Well, today we’re going to talk about the Yuletide season. Of course, we’re in that time of year. Happy holidays everybody. And today specifically, we’re going to talk about the Sacred Herbs of Yule and Christmas: Remedies, Recipes, Magic, and Brew for the winter season. And our guest is the author of the book by the same name, Ellen Evert Hopman. And Ellen has been with us before and we’re so glad to have her on the programs again. She’s a master herbalist and homeopath who has been a druidic initiate since 1984, a member of the Great Council of Mages and Sages, and a former professor at the Gray School of Wizardry. She’s presented at schools and workshops across the United States and Europe. She’s the author of several books, including Secret Medicines from Your Garden, the Sacred Herbs of Spring and The Sacred Herbs of Samhain. She lives in Massachusetts, and we’re so glad to have her with us. Ellen Evert Hopman, welcome back to the program.
Ellen Evert Hopman:
Thank you so much for having me again.
Jim:
Well, it’s good to speak with you and it is a magical time of year. And in your book you talk about origins. I think most people listening realize that many of our traditions and so forth didn’t spring forth from just the Christian Christmas holiday, but were, shall we say, borrowed from other traditions. Can you talk about that a little bit? How some of these sacred herbs were originally used for other celebrations and continue to be used for other celebrations?
Ellen Evert Hopman:
Well, the origins of Christmas and Yule go back thousands of years long before Christianity even.The Egyptians were sharing fruit cake and decorating the house with greenery 4,000 years ago, for example, that we know of. And they may have been doing it even before that to honor the winter solstice and the return of the sun. And they had a God who was named Horus. Baby. Horus was born every year at the winter solstice hanging in a tree, and his parents were Isis and Osiris, and that was the Holy Family, which comes to us from Egyptian religion. So right there that a lot of the underpinnings of Christianity come directly from Egypt, the day of judgment, all kinds of stuff, the Holy Family, the Trinity and all that. And then Yule is the Scandinavian Festival, or jul, and that was brought into Britain by Danish Vikings around the ninth or 10th century.
And that was a long period, weeks long, where people ate a lot of pork and drank a lot of alcohol and burned Yule logs. That’s where yule logs and the Romans, of course, on December 25th, that was the birthday of the God Mirthras, and he’s a Persian God, but he was worshiped in Rome, and that was his birthday. He’s the God of light, of the rising son of covenants, contracts, truth, friendship. He was guardian of the cattle. He was the Lord of the harvest and the Lord of the waters. And his big birthday celebration was December 25th, and we really had no direct evidence that Jesus was ever born on December 25th. If anything, he was probably born in the spring based on the taxes that were collected. So that got grafted on. In the book I go into a lot of this about the histories, all these different traditions that got grafted on and became what we now consider Christmas or the Christ Mass, which is the Christian celebration or Yule, which is the Pagan celebration. That’s part of the book besides herbs.
Jim:
Well, the thing is is that plants and herbs are a huge part of this time of the year in the celebration of Christmas and winter solstice and so forth. Can you talk about the prominence of plants and herbs in the various celebrations of this time of the year?
Ellen Evert Hopman:
Okay. Well, again, going back, as I said, the Egyptians were decorating their homes with greenery. The Romans at Saturnalia liked to exchange gifts, and they would tuck a little piece of Holly into the presents. The presents were probably wrapped in cloth with ribbons. They didn’t have paper. But holly is something that we still think of today, and it’s evergreen. Anything that’s evergreen is very much associated with the season, and that has to do with immortality. Those are considered herbs of immortality, conifers, pines. Anyway, anything evergreen is sacred to the season, and that’s why we put it on the door. That’s why we have it in the house. And I mean, there’s so many herbs that I talk about. I talk about herbs that are edible. I talk about herbs for decoration. I talk about spices that you can use in foods and in drinks, and I give the magical properties as well as the practical properties of all the foods and herbs and spices that I mentioned. But for example, Bay Laurel was used by the Greeks and the Romans in their Olympian competitions, at poetry competitions, and they would award somebody with a crown of Bay Laurel, which is a way of saying, you are an immortal. You are like a God.
And they would also hang wreaths of Laurel on the door during the winter solstice season, the darkest time of year to symbolize victory over death. And we kind of do the same thing. We put, a lot of people will put a wreath of pine or spruce or any kind of plant that stays green all year, a holly wreath on the door. Why do we do that? We do that because we’re saying life goes on. It continues, no matter how dark things get. And I mean, there’s just a lot of them. Mistletoe is another one that has very ancient roots that goes back to ancient Scandinavia; boxwood, that also stays green. That’s another symbol of immortality. And the Romans thought of it as an herb of prosperity and persistence and wisdom. Bayberry, which was discovered by early American colonists, and they made candles out of it. But that’s considered very lucky to bring luck into the home.
I talk about poinsettia, which is actually native to Mexico, which was the sacred herb of the Aztecs, and it was discovered by Franciscan monks in the 17th century when they got over here; and rosemary, which the scent of rosemary was said to keep evil spirits away, and it was used as a wash. I mean, back in ancient times, they didn’t have bleach and they didn’t have Listerine, and they had the only disinfectants that they had were aromatic herbs, and rosemary was a big one of those. So you would wash the sick room, you would wash the dead, you would clean things with rosemary. So they said, oh, Rosemary keeps evil spirits away. If you wash the house with rosemary floor wash, you won’t be sick. That kind of thing.
Jim:
It’s interesting to me how prevalent, for example, my house, we celebrate Christmas. It’s a big thing for us, but you don’t think about how many plants come into play. And when you sit down and really think about it, it’s amazing how prominent plants are in such a dark season. And again, it makes sense because it’s the idea of the victory over the death and the evergreen and oh Tannenbaum and all of that. Now, you also talk in the book, I love this section of the seasonal magic of plants, and you talk about all the different ones in that winter gathering, that plants that stay green all winter are considered to be very wise,
Ellen Evert Hopman:
Right, because they know how to survive. They live in the heat of summer, they do fine. In the coldest, darkest winter. They do fine. So this must be a plant that really knows something. So spiritually, if you want to strengthen yourself, you can make a brew out of a plant like that, or you can wear it around your neck, or you can wear it as a crown on your head, or you can decorate the house with it, or you can put a branch of it over the door so that everybody coming and going is blessed by the energy of that plant. I mean, that’s what we’re doing when we bring Christmas trees into the house. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re saying that life goes on no matter what.
Jim:
It also occurs to me how common spices are in the various kinds of food that we eat during this year. Is that tied in? Is that intentional, bringing life, bringing vitality through foods that maybe have some tastes and scents that we don’t necessarily eat during the different parts of the year?
Ellen Evert Hopman:
Right. There are certain spices, like nutmeg for example. It’s very common at Christmas, and nutmeg is an herb of prosperity. So by creating a dish, we grate a little fresh nutmeg on top of our eggnog, for example, or on our pudding. And why do we do that? It’s an herb of prosperity, and you’re saying that even in the dark of winter when everything appears to be dead, we’re going to survive. We’re going to be fine. And in the book, what I was kind of thinking, there’s two ways you can work with the plants in the book. Again, I give an edible recipe. I give the magical properties, I give the spiritual properties, and of course I give cautions for every single plant that I mentioned.
But for example, there’s a whole chapter on making different drinks for the Yuletide season for many different cultures, things, hibiscus brews, which are red from South America or Afro-Caribbean and wassail from Britain, just from all over the place. But what I do is I list, I give a recipe, I list the ingredients, and then I list the magical properties of every single ingredient that goes either into the recipe for a food or for a drink. So what I was kind of imagining was I was hoping people would, if they wanted to, you don’t have to, you can just make the drink, or if you pay attention to the magical properties, you can chant and sing over the brew as you’re making it. And I visualize people, and I even give little chants in the book. You can stir the brew while you’re making it, and it becomes a potion.
So if you remember potions from Harry Potter, from Hogwarts, but it’s a fun thing to do with the group, a magical potion. And these potions are all about honoring the sun, strengthening the sun so that it comes back. Certain herbs, like chocolate for example, we eat a lot of chocolate at Christmas. Chocolate is about bringing people together, ties of love and friendship. And that goes back to ancient Aztec culture, the different spices, the warming spices which bring passion and joy and love like ginger, for example, and cinnamon do that. But I list all the magical properties so you can pass the drink around or the dish. I have a lot of dishes from a lot of different cultures. Polish, Russian, Italian, German, Swiss, I mean, you name it, it’s in there depending on your ancestry, and you can take it in as a kind of a magical tool if that’s what you want to do, or you can just make a traditional meal.
Jim:
Now, are there any traditions from the pagan tradition or other traditions that maybe are not as popular now that you’d like to see make a comeback to a broader audience?
Ellen Evert Hopman:
Well, there are some that all the pagans that I know, and my best friends are pagans. We all do a Yule log one way or another. That’s something that most people don’t do, I don’t think in general society, but in ancient times, and I have a whole chapter on Yule logs, like what kind of woods are appropriate, how you gather it, how you honor it when you bring it in the house, that kind of thing. In ancient times, it was very important to have a Yule log burning in the hearth, and remember that the hearth was actually a fire altar because prayers were set in the hearth. And if you wanted to send a message, for example, in Orkney, if a big storm was coming, you could put a little bit of cake or make a food offering to the flames in the hearth, and then that offering would be carried up by the smoke and it would go out the chimney, and that would tell the storm gods to please leave your house alone, so that you would be safe.
That’s very traditional, just fling a little bit of food into the fire. In Scotland and many other areas, the women would smoor the fire at night. That is, they would pray over the fire, they would bank the fire, they would cover the embers with ashes so that they would stay warm until the morning, and then they would build up the fire in the morning and they would pray over the fire. This has gone back thousands of years, the idea of the hearth being an altar, because flames carry things upward to the sky gods. So back in the day, they would have a yule log. And a yule log is big enough that sometimes it was a whole tree trunk depending on the size of the hearth, and you start burning it at one end. and as that end burns, you just keep pushing it in more and more, and you keep it going through the darkest part of the year.
That’s what the winter solstice is. It’s the time of the longest nights and the shortest days. So during that period of maximum darkness, you keep that Yule log going, and in different cultures, they might deliberately pick woods like pine, for example, which sparks a lot. Normally you don’t want to use woods that spark in your fireplace. You want to use something like oak or ash, those would be really good. But for yule, you want sparks. You want sparks going up the chimney, sometimes they would throw salt on the log to make it spark. And why do they do that? Because in the darkest part of the year, the coldest part of the year, the house is closed up, the windows are shut, the doors are shut. The only openings that are left are the keyhole and the chimney. So there’s a lot of lore, whether it’s La Befana in Italy, who’s a Christmas witch who comes down the chimney, or Santa Claus who comes down the chimney.
Why do we have these traditions? It’s because spirits can come down the chimney. That’s how they get into the house. So it’s a little bit contradictory. You want to have a fire going continuously to prevent the nasty spirits from coming down the house, but apparently it doesn’t block the good ones from coming down, the bad ones who don’t like fire and light. But another way of doing a Yule log, if you don’t have a fireplace and you don’t have a hearth, is you just get, and I’ve even seen fake logs, but you can get a section of log and hollow out areas and put candles in there and burn candles, and especially on winter solstice night, that’s an important time to do that. If you don’t have a fireplace, you can do that.
Yeah, I mean, the reason we put lights on Christmas trees, the reason we put lights on bushes and on the house, it’s the same idea. We’re trying to scare off the nasty spirits. And the reason that there’s a lot of nasties flying around at this time. Some of them fly through the sky in Germanic and Norse traditions, and some of them come up from underground in the Greek tradition, and I write about all this, but they like the darkest time of year because it’s closest to what they’re used to because they live in the underworld. The underworld of the ancestors and the fairies, and the dead. They all live underground, so they like it when it’s dark and cold. That’s their season, and they emerge. So we put lights on the house and we put lights on the bushes and lights on the Christmas tree, and we light candles, and we’re repeating what our ancestors did for thousands of years. They would’ve had bonfires going, they would’ve had a yule log in the hearth. I mean, we’re just doing the same thing. We’ve just forgotten.
Jim:
Now, you talk about the gift bringers, and I will say to those of you listening out there who celebrate Christmas like I do, I totally believe in Santa Claus. He’s real. Just for the record, for anybody listening out there who’s curious about that. But Ellen, can you talk to us about the overall traditions of gift bringers, not only in the Christian tradition, but in all these traditions or many of them?
Ellen Evert Hopman:
Well, the thing that I found most interesting is I was researching for the book In our culture, we think of St. Nicholas, we think of Santa Claus, and these are all male figures, but I was astounded to find out how many female gift bringers there are, and in a lot of different cultures. For example, I mentioned La Befana, who is the Christmas witch in Italy. She comes around on epiphany bringing gifts to kids, and she comes down the chimney, and of course she’s dressed in black, which is very good because then the soot doesn’t show, and she comes down riding a broom, and you’re supposed to get a new broom, and you’re supposed to put your broom out next to the horse so that she will bless it when she comes down. So that’s the Italian Christmas witch. In Russia, you have a character called Snow Maiden, and she comes with grandfather frost and may bring gifts
.
In Germany, you have Lutzelfrau who brings apples and nuts and sweets to children. Mother Christmas is actually Mrs. Claus. Mrs. Claus doesn’t get a lot of attention in our culture. I’m not sure why. She gets some, but not much. But Mother Christmas is a gift bringer and St. Nicholas’s wife traveled with him. She handed out gifts from a basket. In Czech areas the blessed mother, they called her the blessed mother. She leaves treats and children’s shoes on December 8th, which is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. In France until the 19th century they had lady Abundia who brought gifts at New Year’s, and she is actually the Roman goddess Abundantia. And Abundantia is the goddess of abundance and prosperity. And there’s a french fairy La Tante Arie, who’s a French fairy who comes on December 24th traveling with a donkey, and she leaves gifts for kids. And of course, all these different gift bringers, if you’re good, you get candy and you get gifts and new clothes and nice things, but if you’re bad, you’re going to get an onion in your shoe or a lump of coal or some sticks, so you better be good because otherwise you won’t get what you want.
But anyway, there’s a whole chapter on this. In Spain, in Cantabria, the Anjanas are mountain fairies who come down with gifts, but they only come every four years, which is interesting is the Russian old woman, babushka just means grandmother, and she brings gifts. She’s an interesting character. She apparently ran into the Magi, the three kings, and she gave them wrong directions on purpose. I’m not sure why, but anyway, it goes on and on. There’s a whole chapter about that. There’s the norse goddess Herta is related to the word for hearth, and anyway, that gives you an idea.
Jim:
Indeed, indeed. You talk about different recipes. What is your favorite? It could be one that we know and love, or it could be one that has been a little bit put on the back burner due to the midst of time and tradition, but what’s your favorite recipe of the season that’s in the book?
Ellen Evert Hopman:
Well, the one thing that I always make and that I’m known for is acorn cake.
Jim:
Ooh, that sounds good.
Ellen Evert Hopman:
Yeah. When I go to people’s houses for, as a guest when I visit, I always bring an acorn cake, and there’ve been years when I made six of these, and each one has six eggs in it, so it’s quite a production. But what I do is in the fall, I go out and I gather acorns, and I used to do it all by myself, but I’m very fortunate now. I have friends that help me out, and we gather acorns, and then we crack the acorns open and leach them, which takes about two weeks. You have to soak them in water for two weeks, and then you change the water every day, and then you grind them up to make a kind of gruel, which you dry in the oven. And once you have that, when you want to make the cake, I have a coffee grinder that I only use for acorns.
It’s actually my acorn grinder. So I take that dried acorn gruel and I put it in the grinder and I make flour, and then I make the acorn cakes, which are really good with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream on the side because it’s very, very rich. It’s a dark brown cake, and it tastes a little bit like it has molasses in it, but there’s no molasses in it. The only sweeteners I use honey, and I use half honey and half organic sugar, but it’s just very rich and people love it. I mean, it’s a beautiful cake. And I mean, it’s very labor intensive, so it’s an act of love. If you give somebody one of these cakes, I once figured out, by the time you gather the acorns process, the acorns leach the acorns, grind the acorns and bake the cake. Each cake is about 80 hours of work.
Jim:
Work. Wow.
Ellen Evert Hopman:
Yeah.
Jim:
Well, it sounds delicious. You’ve made me hungry, but wow. Wow. That is a labor of love. No question about the Yeah,
Ellen Evert Hopman:
That’s my favorite though. That’s what I always do.
Jim:
As we wind up this chat today, and I certainly think if you’re interested in the traditions and the lore and so forth of this time of year, certainly get the book, the Sacred Herbs of Yule and Christmas: Remedies, Recipes, Ragic, and Brews for the winter season. But is there something you’d like to leave people with to know about this book and this season and these sacred herbs?
Ellen Evert Hopman:
Just that we’re all having a hard time. I mean, we’ve come through a really tough few years when we couldn’t visit with family, we couldn’t visit with friends, and we had to stay home, and those of us who can hear the podcast are obviously survivors, so we’re very lucky. So this is just a chance. I mean, there’s crafts in the book. As I said, there’s recipes and brews with the magical properties, so it would be a fun thing to do with your family or with your friends, and just to get together and celebrate and have a good time and just be grateful that we’re still here and we got through it. Just like the plants of the solstice season, we’re evergreen and we’re still here.
Jim:
I think the message to be thankful is appropriate and spot on because we’re here, we’re surviving and hopefully thriving, and we’re in this holiday season. Whatever flavor it may take for you. Ellen Evert Hopman, thank you for joining us today to talk about the Sacred Herbs of Yule and Christmas: Remedies, Recipes, Ragic, and Brews for the winter season, and tell folks how they can find the book and more information about all of your work.
Ellen Evert Hopman:
Well, my website is elleneverthopman.com. That’s E-L-L-E-N-E-V as in Victor, ER, T H O P as in Paul, M A N com. You can find my books on Amazon. You can find them at Barnes and Noble. You can find them at Simon and Schuster. You can go to my website if you want to order signed copies, elleneverethopman.com. And basically if you just Google my name, the book should come up.
Jim:
Excellent. The book is, again, this is Sacred Herbs of Yule and Christmas. Ellen, thank you for joining us today.
Ellen Evert Hopman:
Thank you very much, and Merry Christmas and happy Yule to everybody,
Jim:
And thank you for tuning into the show. We certainly appreciate it. Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you, and may you have the most delicious treats and the best holiday season ever. We’ll talk to you next time. Bye-Bye.