Welcome back to the Aelfen newsletter. This issue belongs to the dark of the year — the solstice, when the light is at its shortest and every tradition I know answers with the same things: resin, evergreen, and fire.
Bearing gifts: frankincense and myrrh
The wise men carried gold, frankincense, and myrrh — and two of the three were tree resins, the most precious substances the ancient world knew. Frankincense for the gods, myrrh for the grave and the altar both: resins were wealth you could burn, a prayer you could watch rise. Two thousand years later they are still the scent of the season, and still, to me, the most honest Christmas gift there is — nothing added, nothing invented, just the tree's own treasure.
All winter green: rosemary, bay, and heather
When everything else in the northern world died back, the evergreens did not — so they came indoors. Rosemary, the herb of remembrance, decked the Christmas churches long before the fir tree did, and bloomed, the old wives said, on Christmas Eve itself. Bay — Apollo's laurel — crowned the Roman midwinter feasts of Saturnalia. And heather, which flowers when it pleases and laughs at poor soil, was Scotland's luck in a sprig. Bring the living green in, and the house remembers that spring is coming.
Lifted with a golden sickle: mistletoe
The Druids, said Pliny, cut mistletoe from the oak with a sickle of gold, catching it in a white cloth so it never touched the ground — a plant that lived between earth and sky, belonging to neither, powerful at the solstice above all times. The Norse told a darker story: mistletoe was the one small plant that brought down Baldur the beautiful. The kissing custom came later and softer. The plant itself never stopped being liminal — a green thing in the dead of winter, growing out of bare branches like a held breath.
Midwinter light: the mullein torch
Solstice is a festival of light in the dark, and one of its oldest candles is a plant. Mullein's tall stalk, dipped in tallow, burned as a torch — the country names remember it: candlewick plant, hag's taper, Our Lady's candle. Processions carried them, and cottages lit them against the longest night: a flower stalk standing in for the returning sun.
Hard to find — like all the best herbs
One of our hardest-to-find herbs is hiding in this letter, in plain sight — knobby, sticky, and patient. Read the first letters of the four story headings, from the top. First reader to email us the herb gets a free packet of it with their next order.
New in the shop
Our four holiday gift sets — the Yule Hearth, the Dreamer's, the Protection & Threshold, and the Apothecary Cabinet — are packed in our Aelfen boxes and ready. For Christmas delivery, order by Thursday, December 17; after that, the studio door in Mission Hills is your friend for pickup. And the season's resins, frankincense and myrrh, are in the shop now.
Thank you for reading, and may your house be green all winter.
— Sara, Aelfen Apothecary
P.S. Have a shop, studio, or treatment room? Aelfen is wholesale now — details here: aelfen-apothecary.com/pages/wholesale