Yule will be celebrated by Wiccans and many other Pagans in the Northern Hemisphere on Dec. 21, the day of the winter solstice. For Pagans, the shortest day of the year marks the end of the descent into darkness and the beginning of the return of the light.
It never fails. I mention that I host a group of women on my farm, every month, around the full moon and someone will say in response, “So, do you guys dance naked around a fire or something?”
At 82, Bernice Mable Graham Telian doubts she’ll live long enough to see the name of her seventh grandmother and 10 others hanged in Colonial Connecticut for witchcraft cleared. Telian was researching her genealogy when she discovered that her seventh grandmother, Mary Barnes of Farmington, Conn., was sent to the gallows at the site of the old State House in Hartford in 1663.