Shamanic Christmas
Tracing Ancestral Roots, Indigenous Foundations, and Decolonizing Our Traditions
A Journey to Ancestral Roots
Was Santa Claus originally a Nordic shaman? Did it all begin with a sacred mushroom, later reshaped into a symbol of consumerism by Coca-Cola? How did we end up here? And how can we walk back? Let’s embark on a cross-cultural journey and approach these topics with curiosity, knowing that the story of Christmas spans thousands of years and encompasses many different cultural, spiritual, and religious threads within its rich tapestry.
This article will focus on just a few aspects of something so vast that we can spend years reading countless books and research papers. But let’s give it a try—let’s begin. One step at a time.
The story of Christmas is one of the most widely known across cultures. What is less commonly recognised is that many of the practices we associate with it today carry far older ancestral roots, including shamanic and pagan traditions that predate Christianity.
Let us take a walk along the human timeline, encountering different cultures and perspectives, and looking at how these older practices were overlaid, reframed, or silenced through processes of Christianisation and later through consumer culture. In this sense, to engage with Christmas differently can also be understood as a gesture inspired by a decolonial approach: loosening inherited narratives of dominance and returning attention to land-based, ancestral ways of marking this season.
This process of remembering may unfold slowly and gradually, or arrive suddenly and even disorientingly, as we rethink how we relate to this annual threshold and its festivities. Let us approach this exploration with gentleness, toward ourselves and toward one another.
