Sabbat
The longest night, kept awake through — not because the sun needs help, but because company does.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Yule is one of the oldest words on the Wheel. Writing in 725, Bede names the two months either side of midwinter Giuli; the Old Norse jól and Old English ġeol stand behind the modern spelling. Underneath it is plain astronomy — the moment the sun reaches its most southerly declination, falling between 20 and 23 December, usually the 21st or 22nd. The date drifts because the tropical year is not a whole number of days.
A favourite claim needs trimming here. "Christmas is only Yule with the serial numbers filed off" is far too tidy. Some midwinter customs do predate the church; several of the ones usually named do not. The decorated tree is a German development of the sixteenth century at the earliest, and became a British fixture only in the 1840s.
Kept simply, the night wants very little: a log, a lamp left burning, food that took time, and the stubborn decision not to hurry. Alban Arthan, the Welsh-sounding alternative, is a Druid-revival coinage rather than an inheritance. In the southern hemisphere the same work belongs to the June solstice.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890)
Frazer gathers the Yule log customs of Europe and notes how consistently the unburnt remnant was kept back — stowed under a bed or over a beam for the year, credited with turning aside lightning and fire, and used at the next midwinter to kindle its successor. The fire, in his reading, was meant to be continuous rather than annual.
Carried forward
Common in contemporary practice
Sitting the night out, or as much of it as a working week allows, with the lights low and one flame kept going until dawn. The practice is less about the sun than about noticing that the year has a floor.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.