Midwinter Truths: What Yule Knew About Companionship That We Forgot

By Cliff Potts
WPS.News — December 26, 2025 — 9:00 p.m. ET

We like to pretend Christmas is a gentle holiday—candles, cocoa, polite kisses under decorative mistletoe placed at respectable angles in respectable homes. But the older world, the one Christmas borrowed heavily from, didn’t bother with our modern stiffness. Yule was a winter festival of survival, companionship, and the unvarnished truth that humans need each other.

And the traditions reflected that honesty. That mistletoe kiss? It didn’t start as a timid peck in the foyer. It was an invitation, a very old and very human signal that warmth is needed, desired, and welcome. Fertility magic wasn’t metaphorical. Midwinter meant cold nights, long dark, and the possibility of not surviving until spring. People responded with the oldest technology they had: each other.

Somewhere along the way, “civilization” scrubbed that truth out.

Once upon a time, a widower was not left alone.

In earlier societies—pagan, medieval, even early agrarian—an older man who had contributed to the community, who carried grief honestly, who wasn’t cruel or violent, was never abandoned to solitude. A widower wasn’t expected to simply fade. Someone in the community stepped in: a cousin, a widow, a niece of similar age, a woman who also needed partnership and stability.

It wasn’t shameful.
It wasn’t scandalous.
It was sensible.

These societies understood something we pretend we’ve outgrown:
a person without companionship is a half-starved soul.

But in our clean, modern, hyper-polite world, we’ve pathologized what used to be considered natural. We tell middle-aged and older widowers they’re supposed to shut down emotionally. We mistake endurance for healing. We call isolation “dignity.” We act like longing has an expiration date.

It doesn’t.

Grief isn’t the end of aliveness.

When an older man looks out at the world and notices beauty—real beauty, human beauty—he isn’t corrupt or broken. He’s alive. He’s remembering that desire, warmth, connection, and the need to be chosen didn’t die with his spouse. That spark isn’t betrayal. It’s biology waking up and asking whether winter has to be lived alone.

This isn’t about disrespecting the past.
It’s about acknowledging that the heart doesn’t operate on the timelines society demands.

The truth is simple, and older than any carol or church hymn:

Humans aren’t meant to endure midwinter alone—emotionally or physically.

Civilization didn’t make us wiser. It made us lonelier.

The old world understood that companionship was a form of survival.
Our world treats it like an optional hobby, something reserved for the young, the glossy, the unblemished.

We lost something in that cultural shift.

We lost honesty.
We lost community.
We lost the reminder that everyone—old, young, widowed, tired, grieving—deserves warmth.

And midwinter, more than any other season, calls that truth out of us.

Maybe that’s why the pagan traditions linger under the surface of Christmas, no matter how many centuries we’ve tried to sand them down. They whisper reminders we still need:

You’re alive.
You deserve connection.
You’re not meant to freeze alone in the dark.

If Yule knew that, why don’t we?

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