Reality Check My Life| Bonus Snack | E83: Yuletide: Keeping the Light at the Longest Night

This episode is a little different.

Instead of a quick insight or a sharp turn, this is a threshold—a place to pause at the longest night of the year and remember something ancient and deeply human.

Yuletide is not “pagan Christmas.”
It is an old, land-rooted observance shaped by survival, seasonality, and relationship. A time when darkness was not feared or bypassed, but honored as the womb from which light slowly returns.

In this special Bonus Snack, Gin explores:

• What Yule actually is (and what it isn’t)

• Mother’s Night and the wisdom of being held

• The Oak King and the Holly King as a cycle of rest and return

• The forest as teacher—and what we’ve lost by disconnecting from land and body

• Why the Twelve Days of Christmas are a Yuletide rhythm, not a countdown

• What the longest night offers us now, in a culture afraid of stillness

This is not a lesson.
It’s a vigil.

A reminder that light does not disappear—it rests.
And that sometimes the most honest thing we can do is stay.

🕯️ Blessed Yule.