cannabis its christmas

The Old Cannabis Xmas

Long before Christmas was all about the birth of Jesus Christ it was a celebration of the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, which falls between December 21 and 22. 

During that parties and xmas pagan time Cannabis was part of the tradition in many forms. Smoked, eated or in drinks.

Viking Times

Though harsh winter months lay ahead, ancient Europeans turned the long, dark nights of late December into a party, known as Yule.

To calm the gods and ward away evil before bedtime, pagans and early Christians smudged their homes and stables with an auspicious number of nine herbs, such as juniper, evergreen resins, milk thistle, mugwort, and likely cannabis, wrote Christian Rästch in Pagan Christmas.

viking traditions

Saint Nicolas

“The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth / And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath,” wrote Clement Clarke Moore in his 1823 poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas (aka ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas).

The jolly, pipe-smoking Santa icon harkens back to an bygone era of smoking of not just tobacco, but baccy: a pungent mixture of forest and meadow herbs smoked at Christmastime that often contained cannabis, according to Rästch. In Pagan Christmas, he wrote that Germans had a special word for the pop of cannabis seeds in their Christmas baccy, which they called knastert.

Old Santa

The Hemp Soup

In The Great Book of Hemp, Rowan Robinson writes of an old Christmas Eve tradition still seen in Poland and Lithuania today: semieniatka, or hemp seed soup, is offered to deceased family members who come back to visit their families over the holidays.

Robinson speculates the custom stretches back to ancient Scythian culture where cannabis was inextricably linked to rituals surrounding death and funerals.

Maybe we lost an old great tradition and we shall recover it?

hemp soup

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