Everything we know for certain about Mothers' Night fits into two sentences, written by an English monk nearly thirteen hundred years ago. I have built one of the most important nights of my year upon them, and I want to explain how, and to be honest about which parts are his and which are mine.
What Bede tells us
In 725 the scholar Bede wrote a book on the reckoning of time, and in it he paused to describe the calendar that his own people had used before they were Christian. The heathen English, he says, began their year on the night that Christians now keep as the birth of the Lord. And that night they called Modraniht, the Night of the Mothers, "on account, we suppose, of the ceremonies which they performed in it, keeping watch all night."
That is all. He does not say who the Mothers were or what was done. He is guessing even at the reason for the name.
Who the Mothers were
We can do a little better than Bede, because we can see what he could not. Across the Rhineland and northern Britain, in the centuries before his time, people of the Roman frontier, many of them Germanic, set up more than a thousand carved stones to the Matronae, the Mothers: three seated women with baskets of fruit and loaves of bread in their laps. And in the North, centuries after him, the sagas describe sacrifices to the Disir, the women of a family's own line who continue to watch over it.
It is very likely that Bede's Mothers stand between the two: the collective female ancestors and guardians of a people, honored at the turning of the year.
There is one more piece of evidence, and as a midwife I hold it close. In the old poem in which the Valkyrie Sigrdrifa teaches the hero the runes, she tells him of help-runes for a woman in labor, to bring the child safely from the mother, and says that with them one should ask the Disir for aid. The women of the old North, in the hardest hours of their lives, called on their foremothers. I have stood in a great many rooms where I would have been glad of them.
When to keep it
Bede places the night at midwinter, by the calendar of his day. Most Heathens now keep Mothers' Night on the eve of the winter solstice, around the twentieth of December, as the first of the twelve nights of Yule. In the southern hemisphere our members keep it in June. The date matters less than the dark.
How we keep it in my house
What follows is modern. I have put it together from the evidence above, from the custom, recorded by a medieval churchman, of women setting a table for the three sisters of fate, and from eleven years of practice with my daughters. Take from it whatever is useful.
- We clean the house. Guests are coming. In German folklore the midwinter visitor Holle rewards an orderly house, and I think the instinct is old.
- We lay the table, with one more place than there are people. On it we set bread, apples, and milk: the foods that sit in the laps of the Mothers on the stones.
- We light a candle for each woman we will name.
- We name them. My mother. Her mother, Karen, who taught me to bake. Her mother, whom I know only from a photograph. Then back as far as the names go, and when the names run out we say: and all the mothers before her, whose names we do not know.
- We name the mothers of the heart. The teacher who told me I could study. The old midwife who trained me. My daughters name their own.
- We say what we are thankful for, and what we ask. Health in the house. A safe birth for a friend who is expecting. Courage.
- We eat together, and the extra place is served first.
- We leave the candles to burn down and the Mothers' portion on the table overnight. In the morning it goes to the garden.
If your family is complicated
Every year someone tells me she cannot keep this night because of what her mother was, or because she was adopted, or because she does not know where she comes from. Please hear this. You choose whom you name.
The Disir are those who stand behind you and wish you well. If the women of your blood did you harm, you are not obliged to light a candle for them. Name the grandmother who was kind, or the aunt, or the neighbor. Name the women who fostered you in body or in spirit. And remember that behind every one of us, however broken the nearest links, there stretch thousands of mothers back into the dark, and among them were surely some who would be glad of you.
You may also keep the night as a mother, an aunt, a teacher, or a friend. Some day you will be one of the names.
A closing word
I began by saying that Bede gives us two sentences. I do not think that is a poverty. He gives us a night, a name, and a watch kept until morning. The rest we bring ourselves: our own dead, our own thanks, our own table. That seems to me exactly as it should be.