When Starbucks unveiled its new holiday season cup in November, devoid of past years' reindeer and holly and trees, some angrily protested the removal of what they considered Christian symbology.
Others just laughed.
"It was all pagan symbology, so that irony was kind of rich," said Nightfall Eventide — legal name John Grasso — a Wiccan whose modern religion draws on multiple pagan traditions.
Wiccans associate those reindeer and holly and trees with a festival they celebrate on the day of the winter solstice, falling this year on Dec. 22.
What is to most New Yorkers the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere is to Wiccans one of eight major holidays. It's called "Yule," and it honors the rebirth of the sun god who goes by many names.
Each sect or "tradition" of Wicca has its own pantheon of deities, mythologies and rituals, but all consider Yule a celebration of the return of light and the end of darkness, as the daylight hours begin to lengthen and the natural world reawakens from hibernation.
It's a time of cleansing and renewal. And it's "very much a holiday of nature," said Eventide, a professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and a priest of a sect that calls itself Braided Wheel.
So we wondered: When your religious beliefs and holidays align so closely with the cycle of nature, how do you observe them in a modern concrete metropolis?
For Eventide, who grew up in Brooklyn, "it's not that hard to see the cycle of the seasons in New York City."
"When I think of autumn, I think of the smell of wood burning in fireplaces and the changing of the leaves in Prospect Park," he said.
"When I think of winter I think of the snowflake going up on 7th Avenue ... hanging off the streetlamps. There is nature here. It's a different nature."
Here's how three sects adapt their Yule festivities to the city:
► Burn candles, not logs:
You've probably seen the looped video of a log burning in a fireplace on TV at Christmastime (or its counterpart on Netflix). In many sects of Wicca, the burning yule log is a symbol of light overtaking darkness.
Of course, when you want to make a burning log the centerpiece of a religious ritual in New York City, it's unlikely you'll be setting it wholly aflame.
"We’ll be indoors in a public space, so we won’t be able to actually burn the log," said Lorelai Plúr na Mara (legal name, Amanda Yachechak), who is a priest of Kenaz Wicca, a sect celebrating its first Yule at a Midtown dance studio Monday.
"But we’re going to have an oak log that’ll be decorated with ... some symbols of the sun and we’re going to add candles into it."
For years, Yule celebrations hosted by the Wiccan Family Temple sent attendees home with the sawed-off stumps of sidewalk Christmas trees, from which they could fashion their own yule logs.
That tradition came to an end when Christmas tree vendors wised up, said temple high priestess Starr Ravenhawk. "Now they’re actually using the end pieces and selling them, and I’m like, 'Are you kidding me?'”
► Drink, don't pour your cider:
According to Plúr na Mara, wassailing is the ancient practice in the Norse, German and Celtic traditions of blessing an orchard to insure its fertility after the solstice, one that involves pouring spiced cider or wine in the ground at a tree's base. People still do it occasionally in the United Kingdom.
In New York, if you don't have access to a rooftop garden, you're plain out of orchards.
There's a workaround for that, though:
"You don’t necessarily have to wassail trees," Plúr na Mara said. "What’s more common nowadays is just sort of toasting to each other, and wishing you will be happy, healthy and fruitful in the coming years.”
► Leave your wreaths in the city park:
Wreaths, a common pagan symbol, play a key role in Ravenhawk's Yule celebration.
"We make a wreath ring similar to the hula hoop, out of pine branches. We make a circle of it so people can step into it," she said.
"You step into the circle and you shout out or you say something or just keep it to yourself and you say what you’re letting go. It goes out of your body and into the wreath, and the wreath is then taken out."
Where in New York does one respectfully dispose of a wreath so loaded with symbolic meaning and with memories?
Many of the coven's wreaths have come to rest in Tompkins Square Park, once the city's primary haven for squatters and punks.
The point, Ravenhawk said, is to "take [the wreath] to a park or somewhere that has a lot of grassy area and earth, and just let it absorb into the earth."
► Buy and eat seasonal foods:
"The foods we eat are also our way of marking the season," said Eventide of his coven. "You'll find that Wiccans are far more conscious of what crop grows at what time of the year, because they'll be able to associate with a given holiday at that time."
For its Yule ritual, the group brews a mulled cider from autumnal apples. (Of course, like true New Yorkers, they also drink coffee, brewed while Eventide reads a folktale aloud.)
In a Facebook post, the priests of Kenaz Wicca have asked that attendees bring "traditional Yule foods" to their potluck. Those include caraway cakes soaked in cider, nuts, root vegetables and all late-harvest vegetables, apples and pears.
