Meaning
Graves' thirteen months of 28 days make 364 days, so one day of the year is left over, and the lists that follow him put it on 23 December, between the end of Elder and the start of Birch. It is the extra day of his "year and a day". It has no tree and no Ogham letter, and it is not the solstice, which falls one or two days earlier.
Our reading treats it as a threshold: the old year finished and the new one not yet begun, a day for looking back and forward at once and belonging fully to neither. That reading is ours, written in 2026.
Not the solstice
The December solstice falls on 21 or 22 December by Universal Time in 195 of the 201 years from 1900 to 2100: on the 22nd in 78 years of the twentieth century and on the 21st in 82 years of the twenty-first. Only in 1903 did it fall on 23 December. For births in this century, 23 December is usually two days after the solstice. It is day 357 of a common year and day 358 of a leap year, not the last day of anything. Graves placed two of his vowels, A and I, at midwinter, as stations of the year rather than months; we do not compute them.
The mistletoe that was added later
Pagan calendar pages of the 2000s gave this day a sign of its own, the mistletoe, with an Irish-looking name and an Ogham letter. None of it has a source. Mistletoe is in no medieval tree list and has no Ogham letter; its Irish name is drualus; and the letter our old engine drew for the day was Ruis, Elder's own. We dropped the sign in October 2026. Its old page now leads to the system page, and is to lead here.
The mistletoe story itself comes from Pliny. He wrote that the Druids "held nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the tree that bears it", and that a priest in a white robe cut it with a golden sickle on a set day of the Moon, the sixth in his Latin. He names no solstice and no calendar. The idea that the Druids saw the mistletoe as the soul of the oak is J. G. Frazer's theory, from 1890. Culpeper's herbal of 1652 puts the plant under the Sun as English plant lore, which has nothing to do with this day.
In the other lists
The lists that follow Graves closely keep 23 December apart, as we do. Most tree-sign websites and calculators have no extra day at all and run Elder to 23 December, so a person born on this day is Elder there and has the extra day here. Every other date agrees. The start of the year at midwinter, and so this day at its end, is Graves' choice: the Insular Celtic year turned at Samain and Beltaine.
Correspondences
Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.
- Place in Graves' year
- The day left over after thirteen months of 28 days sourced
- Relation to the solstice
- One or two days after it; usually two days after in this century sourced
- The mistletoe sign
- A later popular addition with no source, no letter and no Irish name; not used disputed
- Mistletoe in Irish
- drualus sourced
- Our reading
- A threshold between the old year and the new, belonging fully to neither our construction
How the schools read it
- Graves, 1948
- The day left over in his "year and a day", with no tree.
- Lists that follow Graves
- Keep 23 December as the extra day, apart from the months.
- Tree-sign websites
- No extra day: Elder runs to 23 December.
- Pagan calendar pages of the 2000s
- A mistletoe sign with an invented name and letter; no source.
- EsoTerrier
- Graves' extra day, with no tree and no letter, and our own short reading.
Claims about it
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23 December is the winter solstice, or the last day of the solar year.
falseWhat the record shows: The December solstice (UTC) falls on 21 or 22 December in 195 of the 201 years from 1900 to 2100, and on 23 December only in 1903. 23 December is day 357 of a common year and day 358 of a leap year.
-
23 December is the day of the mistletoe, a sign with its own Irish name and Ogham letter.
falseWhat the record shows: Graves left the day without a tree. Mistletoe is in no medieval tree list and has no Ogham letter; the Irish for it is drualus. The letter our old engine showed for the day was Ruis, Elder's.
-
The Druids cut mistletoe at the winter solstice, or on 23 December.
falseWhat the record shows: The only ancient account, Pliny's, has them cut it from an oak on a day of the Moon, the sixth in his Latin (his Victorian translators print the fifth). No solstice is named.
-
The Druids saw the mistletoe as the soul of the oak.
unverifiedWhat the record shows: A theory of J. G. Frazer's, from 1890, not a belief any ancient source records.
-
The Celtic year turned on 23 December.
falseWhat the record shows: The Insular Celtic year turned at Samain, about 1 November, and Beltaine, about 1 May. The day left over at the end of the year is Graves' device.
