Destiny: Ellen Evert Hopman, Ancestral Celebrations, New Year's Eve

Earth Ancients

Cliff Dunning

Science, Society & Culture, Social Sciences

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 31 December 2025

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

• Explores in depth the medicinal and magical properties of the many herbs, barks, and berries associated with the Christmas and Yuletide season

• Looks at the origins of the Christmas tree and Santa Claus, as well as female gift bringers, holiday Spirits, and Yuletide animals

• Shares crafts such as how to make a Yule Log, practices such as Winter Solstice divinations, and recipes for traditional foods and drinks

For millennia cultures have taken time out to honor the darkest days of the year with lights, foods, and festivities.

In ancient Egypt, people decorated their homes with greenery at the festival of the rebirth of the God Horus. The ancient Romans shared gifts, especially candles, at the midwinter festival of Saturnalia. In Scandinavian and Germanic cultures, the Yule Log was burned in the hearth, fruit orchards were wassailed, and sheaves of wheat were displayed to carry luck into the New Year. In Celtic cultures, mummers and guisers went door to door, and European mistletoe (Viscum album) was gathered by Druids as a medicinal and magical aid.

Ellen Evert Hopman shares folklore, recipes, rituals, and crafts to enliven your Yuletide observance. She explores the origins of the Christmas tree and Santa Claus as well as holiday Spirits and Yuletide animals. She explains how to perform Winter Solstice divinations and make traditional foods and drinks such as Elizabethan gingerbread cookies and Wassail. And she looks in depth at the medicinal and magical properties of the many herbs, barks, and berries associated with the Christmas and Yuletide season such as Frankincense and Myrrh, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Hibiscus, Bayberry, and many more. This guide offers practical and magical ways to celebrate and honor the darkest days of the year.

Ellen Evert Hopman is a master herbalist and lay homeopath, who has been a Druidic initiate since 1984. She is a founding member of the Order of the White Oak, the Archdruidess and founder of Tribe of the Oak, a former professor at the Grey School of Wizardry, and a member of the Grey Council of Mages and Sages. She is the author of Celtic herbals and Druid novels, including Secret Medicines from Your Garden, The Sacred Herbs of Samhain, and Once Around the Sun: Stories, Crafts, and Recipes to Celebrate the Sacred Earth Year. She lives in Massachusetts.

https://elleneverthopman.com/

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Destiny. Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning.
0:30.3	No more champagne and the fireworks are through.
0:47.0	Here we are, me and you, feeling lost and feeling blue. it's the end of the party and the morning seems so gray so unlike yesterday now's the time for us to say Happy New Year
0:56.0	May we all have a vision
1:01.0	now and then
1:03.0	of a world where every neighbor is a friend
1:08.0	Happy New Year Happy New Year, Happy New Year,
1:13.6	May we all have our hopes I will to try
1:18.6	We wanted to have one last podcast for 2025
1:23.6	to promote the New Year's Eve.
1:29.2	And this is it.
1:30.7	This is our last podcast.
1:33.2	And I think it's a good one because we are looking back at how our ancestors celebrated New Year's Eve.
1:40.1	Would you believe that it actually happened as far back as the Roman period?
1:45.0	In fact, we think it goes back even further into deep history where the last day of the year was celebrated, which is New Year's Eve, with a number of pagan rituals, blessings, and divinations.
2:06.3	Now remember, divinations is working with runes, working with special tarot.
2:12.6	In some cases, it's working with astrology, but what we're talking about today are divinations that have been
2:19.4	uncovered by a number of historians and also discovered in tombs and graves and archives
2:29.4	that show us our ancestors thought about the coming year, thought about finishing up and completing consciously where they have been and where they're going.
2:44.4	Hey, this is Cliff, your host of destiny. And today, we're looking at the return of Ellen Everett Hopman.
2:50.1	She is a, she's written a number of books on ancient history.
2:55.3	Most notably, the sacred herbs, yule, and Christmas, remedies, recipes, magic and bruise
	...

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