A model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025. Developer KB Home is marketing Dixon Trail as the first “wildfire resilient neighborhood” in the U.S., constructed using fire-resistant materials and methods.
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Topline:
Dixon Trail is the first purpose-built “wildfire resilient neighborhood” in the United States. Making that a reality for the millions of Californians who already live in harm’s way is a daunting and costly challenge that lawmakers are only just beginning to grapple with.
Why it matters: The design of each house and the layout of the entire subdivision — with healthy buffers between each building and scant flammable vegetation — meet standards set by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, a research nonprofit funded by the insurance industry. The institute began issuing its “wildfire prepared” designations to homes in 2022. Think organic certification on produce, except for homes built to withstand wildfire. This is the first time the institute plans to give its stamp of approval to an entire neighborhood.
Why now: Though only half of the 64 homes have been constructed, the development had its grand opening earlier this month. No one from KB would say as much, but in purely marketing terms, the timing couldn’t have been better. For years, wildfire-resilient home and neighborhood design has been a niche consideration for many California homeowners. January’s Los Angeles firestorms have made it feel more like an urgent necessity.
Read on... for more details about the neighborhood and challenges homeowners with older homes might have to deal with to make homes fire resistant.
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The homes in the half-built subdivision look a lot like all the others nestled up against the parched, shrubby hills of Escondido, north San Diego County.
But look a little closer. The gutters and vents are enclosed in a thin, wire mesh. Each window is double-paned, the glass tempered to withstand the heat of a wildfire, the stucco around the shutters resistant to flame. The privacy fences, a suburban staple, look like wood, but are actually brown-tinted steel. Every foundation sits behind a moat of gravel.
National mega-developer KB Home is marketing Dixon Trail as the first purpose-built “wildfire resilient neighborhood” in the United States. The next time fire rips through the chaparral in surrounding hills (a question of when, not if) this cluster of homes is being built to keep the flames at the subdivision’s edge.
Though only half of the 64 homes have been constructed, the development had its grand opening earlier this month. No one from KB would say as much, but in purely marketing terms, the timing couldn’t have been better. For years, wildfire-resilient home and neighborhood design has been a niche consideration for many California homeowners. January’s Los Angeles firestorms have made it feel more like an urgent necessity.
“Buyers want to feel safe in their homes and this is a really big plus for them,” said Steve Ruffner, who oversees KB projects across the region.
The design of each house and the layout of the entire subdivision — with healthy buffers between each building and scant flammable vegetation — meet standards set by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, a research nonprofit funded by the insurance industry. The institute began issuing its “wildfire prepared” designations to homes in 2022. Think organic certification on produce, except for homes built to withstand wildfire.
This is the first time the institute plans to give its stamp of approval to an entire neighborhood.
Building a fire resilient home from scratch is one thing. Bringing older homes up to that heightened standard is a more daunting and costly challenge — and one that California lawmakers at the state and local level are only beginning to grapple with.
Millions of Californians already live in tinderbox canyons and at the edges of shrub fields and overgrown forests. An unknown number live in homes built before 2008, when the state introduced its wildfire-minded building code for new construction in high hazard areas. Some home-hardening retrofits are cheap and DIY-able. Others less so. A report from 2024 by the independent research group Headwater Economics put the cost to harden a two-story, 2,000 square-foot single family home at anywhere from $2,000 to “more than $100,000.”
Karen Collins, vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, calls these retrofits “pre-disaster mitigation” measures. As wildfires grow more severe and costly, these measures can offer “a huge return on investment from what is otherwise spent at the loss,” she said. Translated from insurance speak: Replacing a roof before a fire is cheaper than replacing an entire house afterward.
“But yes, to retrofit and put on new roofs and new siding, that gets into the multiple tens of thousands of dollars, so there's a public policy trade off,” she said. “Like, how do we do this?”
Steve Ruffner, regional general manager for KB Home’s coastal division, touches a window with two panes of tempered glass on the side of a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.
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Some local governments — albeit not many — offer grants and incentives to fire-wary homeowners hoping to make these upgrades.
The insurance industry is beginning to offer discounts to some homeowners who make firewise changes, though the promised savings are often smaller than many homeowners expect or demand.
There aren’t any statewide plans to help harden California’s housing stock en masse, though a pilot project is underway and the Legislature is considering a few other ideas.
Beyond changes in policy, California homeowners, planners, real estate agents and developers may need to change the way they think about wildfire risk, said Yana Valachovic, a forest health and fire expert with the University of California. Rather than viewing home hardening as a luxury expense, or even a necessary cost that must be begrudgingly assumed, such protections might just need to become standard features of homeownership across the increasingly fire-prone American West.
“It needs to be spoken about in the advertisement of the house, because these are all keys to insurability and the protection of your investment,” said Valachovic. “Fuels management and home hardening are just as important as a remodeled kitchen at this point.”
A fireproof home?
Home-hardening experts try to think like embers in a windstorm.
Open eaves (the cavities beneath a roof’s overhang); vents that lead into an attic; wood decks; wood shingles; wood fences; and any plants, lawn furniture, cars, sheds and trash bins stowed right up against the house — all of these present an inviting array of nooks and crannies in which embers can settle and smolder. Hardening a home means covering them up, replacing material that burns with material that doesn’t, and clearing a five-foot non-combustible buffer around the house, an area state regulators call “zone zero”
Ember-proofing alone isn’t always enough. In urban conflagrations, like the ones in Los Angeles, flames go horizontal in the gale-force winds, turning a burning home into a blow-torch trained upon its neighbors. The sheer heat radiating off of a burning structure can warp and melt window frames 20 feet away.
In those conditions, cement siding and tempered-glass can give a home a fighting chance.
Steve Ruffner, regional general manager for KB Home’s coastal division, places his hand on a window shudder made out of non-combustible stucco material on a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.
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Enclosed eaves that prevent heat buildup are installed on a home.
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A non-combustible metal fence is placed in front of a five-foot buffer zone in the backyard of a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.
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When the Insurance Institute conducted a formal forensic survey in Los Angeles, they found repeated examples of homes where a single double-paned tempered glass window, a stucco wall or a walkway free of decorative plants likely kept the flames at bay.
Experts turn to the surviving homes for lessons after every major fire. In Maui, after the Lahaina waterfront burned in 2023, images of a single red-roofed home, lonely and seemingly untouched, went viral. Reporting later revealed that just prior to the disaster, the homeowners replaced the roof with a thick metal one and removed its surrounding vegetation. They were trying to keep out termites, not flames, but fire doesn’t consider motive.
There may be no such thing as a fire-proof house, but if vulnerability to disaster is a numbers game, home hardening — like seat belts, bike helmets and vaccines — can up the odds of survival.
Pilots and programs
The closest thing California has to a statewide home hardening campaign at the moment is a $117 million pilot project.
The California Wildfire Mitigation Program, run jointly by the California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) and the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, is funding half a dozen neighborhood-wide retrofits in especially fire-prone and economically distressed corners of the state.
The program seeks to tackle the problem of fire resilience at a community scale. Managing wildfire risk is a bit like managing an infectious disease: There’s only so much a single homeowner can do if their neighbors are unprotected.
Fuels management and home hardening are just as important as a remodeled kitchen at this point.
— Yana Valachovic, forest health and fire expert, University of California
The pilot was launched by the legislature in 2019, but is only just beginning to get off the ground. So far, 21 homes have been retrofitted: 19 in Kelseyville, Lake County and two in Dulzura, east of San Diego. Neighborhoods in the Sierra foothills and California’s far north are still working through the start-up and permitting process.
Each house presents its own array of costly challenges. New roofs, new siding, new windows, replacing decks, cleaning brush. “We don’t want to just kinda harden the home,” said Deanna Fernweh, program manager for the Lake County project.
This is new terrain for the state and the pilot has run into plenty of unexpected complications along the way. Fire-resistant materials are a specialty product that can be hard to source, particularly if you need something to be just the right size. Local contractors don’t always know much about fire risk, nor do the local permitting officials. Some counties require construction workers to be paid union-level wages. With most of the money coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the work is also subject to rigorous environmental standards. Any work done in the spring and summer has to wait on nest surveys to ensure that construction doesn’t disturb migratory or endangered birds.
An aerial view of homes in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.
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All of that adds to the price tag. The cheapest retrofit so far has come in at roughly $36,000, said J. Lopez, executive director of the statewide program. That was a tidy, well-maintained home in Kelseyville. The most expensive so far was $110,000. At current funding levels, the program is on track to harden roughly 2,000 homes.
That’s not likely to put a noticeable dent in the total number of vulnerable homes across the state. But Lopez said part of the goal of the pilot is to figure out just how expensive, delay-ridden and generally annoying it is to harden a neighborhood — and then figure out ways to make it all less so.
“When the VCR first came out, I think the first ones were about $1,500,” he said. “I leave it to American ingenuity to come up with solutions — and we are part of that, helping move that along.”
The pilot is currently set to expire in 2029, though the Legislature is considering a bill to make it permanent. Future funding remains an open question. So far FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance Grant program, which provides much of the funding for the California program, has been spared the cuts that have felled other emergency response and preparedness initiatives under the Trump administration.
Legislators may also take up legislation this year to shave off some of the tax revenue the state currently collects from property insurers and redirect it toward a grant program for fire-resistant roofs and vegetation management work. Another bill would create a “Community Hardening Commission” inside the state’s Department of Insurance to be tasked with recommending new home hardening rules and improving old ones. A third bill would create a state-run home hardening certification program, with the hope being that insurers will be more likely to cover a home with the state’s imprimatur.
“Almost everyone knows what the things are that we have to do with home hardening,” Assemblymember Steve Bennett, an Oxnard Democrat and the author of that certification bill, said at a budget committee hearing in February. “We’ve talked about it and talked about it, but we’re not really making much progress.”
Locals step up
Absent a comprehensive statewide hardening program, some cities are trying to fill the gaps.
In 2020, Marin County voted overwhelmingly to tax itself to fund a countywide wildfire prevention program. The program shells out roughly $20 million each year on individualized home safety assessments, home hardening and vegetation clearing grants and evacuation route clearing operations.
In the city of Novato, the local fire district has used those funds to inspect every house in town. Homeowners can apply for matching grants — up $1,500 for home hardening and $1,000 for brush clearing.
Sometimes that’s enough to cover the cost of the work. Vent screens aren’t expensive, and vegetation management can be cheap if a homeowner is willing to do the work themselves.
Homes under construction in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.
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But often the grants aren’t nearly enough to cover all the called-for work. In Novato at least, a financial nudge is often all that people need, said Fire Marshal Lynne Osgood. According to data collected by the fire district over the last fiscal year, the city doled out half a million dollars in these matching grants to fund home-hardening projects; homeowners spend four times that amount.
“(Novato homeowners) are getting pressure from the insurance companies, they’re seeing, year after year, major conflagrations where thousands upon thousands of people are losing their homes,” Osgood said. “They are highly motivated.”
Where Marin County is offering carrots, other cities are using sticks. Across the Bay, the city of Berkeley just passed its own “zone zero” regulations which will require hill-dwelling residents to keep the five feet around their homes free of plants, wood fencing and other flammable odds and ends. The new policy will go into effect at the beginning of next year when it will be enforced with the possibility of daily fines.
That’s a few years ahead of the rest of the state. Cal Fire is scrambling to cobble together specific “zone zero” regulations for all high hazard areas, something a state law directed them to do by 2023. In February, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing the department to “accelerate” its regulatory process and produce a final rule by the end of the year. The most recent draft of the regulations would give homeowners three years to comply.
'Do this or you’re done'
Byers Enterprises has run a steady roofing business out of Grass Valley, just west of the Tahoe National Forest, since the late 1980s. In 2022, it started a specific division for home hardening.
“We’re seeing a real groundswell of interest,” said Jeff Fierstein, the company’s general manager. Some of that interest is due to the Los Angeles fires, which put fire risk top of mind for many.
But he said roughly half of his customers are turning to him out of duress. “The insurance companies are saying ‘Do this or you’re done,’” he said.
Not every fire-prone jurisdiction has Marin’s resources or Berkeley’s political appetite for new mandates. For the majority of Californians living in the so-called wildland urban interface, the most powerful nudge toward home hardening comes in the form of an insurance company’s premium hike or non-renewal notice.
A regulation from 2023 is forcing California insurers to offer discounts to homeowners who make certain home hardening investments or join Firewise communities, voluntary neighborhood disaster preparedness groups. But the approval process has been slow, the discounts vary from carrier to carrier, the requirements coming from insurers don’t always match the state’s own standards and the savings on offer are, according to some, miserly.
California property insurers are not in an especially discounting mood. After a decade of staggering wildfire-related losses, surging inflation and what the industry has long characterized as a sclerotic regulatory environment that doesn’t allow them to cover their costs, many carriers are looking for any excuse to drop California customers.
That dour climate might begin to change soon, said Janet Ruiz, a spokesperson for the industry association, the Insurance Information Institute. The state’s Department of Insurance is rolling out a series of policy changes aimed at enticing insurers back into the market. That overhaul “should bring more insurance companies into writing more policies,” putting them on a stronger financial footing and making them more willing to cut certain homeowners a break.
An aerial view of homes under construction in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.
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Even with the right regulations in place, insurers aren’t known for embracing change, said Dave Jones, California’s former Department of Insurance head who now runs the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley’s law school.
Earlier this month, Jones and the nonprofit Nature Conservancy released a new, first-of-its-kind insurance policy for Tahoe-Donner, one of the country’s largest homeowners associations. In exchange for years of tree thinning and brush clearing work, the Truckee-based HOA will receive nearly 40% off on its insurance policy.
“It's a very conservative industry,” he said. “You need to show them that an insurer is able to (make money doing this) before others will follow suit.”
The upside: The new policy shows that at least one insurer — in this case, Globe Underwriting, based in London — believes it can account for the reduced risk that comes with certain wildfire mitigation efforts and then pass some of those savings onto customers.
The downside: The policy only covers commonly held land, not individual homes and, at least for now, the Nature Conservancy is footing the $55,000 annual premium.
“The big success here is that the insurance policy was written at all because this is an area where insurers are pulling out and it was written because of the forest treatment work that the homeowners association is undertaking,” said Jones.
Whether it’s forest management programs, zone zero mandates or home hardening grants, the public is only going to support these taxpayer-funded initiatives if they start to open up the insurance market and bring down premiums, he said.
“Part of what we're trying to do here is demonstrate that this can be done, convince insurers to do it, but also continue to build public support for these necessary investments,” said Jones. “Because this stuff is not inexpensive to do.”
Aaron Schrank
has been on the ground, reporting on homelessness and other issues in L.A. for more than a decade.
Published December 24, 2025 3:16 PM
Members of the clean-up crew dismantled tents located on the Veterans Row homeless encampment along San Vicente Boulevard just outside the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs campus in November 2021.
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Topline:
A federal appeals court has ordered the Department of Veterans Affairs to build more than 2,500 housing units on its West Los Angeles campus. The plaintiff’s attorneys say the decision could effectively end veteran homelessness in the region.
The ruling: The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling Tuesday that found the agency discriminated against disabled veterans by leasing land to commercial interests instead of providing housing. The Ninth Circuit ordered the VA to construct 750 temporary housing units within 18 months and 1,800 permanent units within six years on the 388-acre property.
How we got here: The property was deeded to the federal government in 1888 specifically as a soldiers' home. In a 2015 settlement, the VA promised to build 1,200 housing units with more than 770 completed by 2022, but the agency fell far short of that deadline. Los Angeles County is home to more than 3,000 unhoused veterans.
Commercial leases: The court invalidated most commercial leases on the property, including Brentwood School's 22-acre sports complex and an oil company's drilling license. However, it overturned the district court's previous invalidation of UCLA's lease for its baseball stadium. The plaintiff's lawyers said they plan to refile that portion of the case.
Read on ... for details about the ruling.
A federal appeals court has upheld a court order requiring the Department of Veterans Affairs to build more than 2,500 housing units on its West Los Angeles campus.
The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday ordered the VA to construct 750 temporary units for veterans within 18 months and 1,800 permanent housing units within six years.
The ruling found the agency had “strayed from its mission” by leasing land to commercial interests like a UCLA baseball field and Brentwood School sports complex, instead of caring for veterans.
“There are now scores of unhoused veterans trying to survive in and around the greater Los Angeles area despite the acres of land deeded to the VA for their care,” Judge Ana de Alba wrote in the opinion.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the Powers v. McDonough case say the ruling could end veteran homelessness in the Los Angeles region, which is home to more than 3,000 unhoused veterans, according to official estimates.
"It's the most important ruling in the history of this country concerning the rights of veterans," said Mark Rosenbaum, lead attorney with Public Counsel, during a press conference Wednesday. “After this case, there should be no such thing as a homeless veteran.”
The VA did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment on the ruling.
‘Long overdue’
The appeals court affirmed most of U.S. District Judge David O. Carter's 2024 ruling, which found the VA discriminated against disabled veterans by failing to provide adequate housing on the 388-acre property deeded as a soldiers' home back in 1888.
The main plaintiff named in the class-action lawsuit, Jeffrey Powers, lived in a tent outside the gates of the VA Medical Center.
At a press conference Wednesday, Powers told reporters this week’s appeals court ruling delivers “about 80%” of what he wanted.
“We got the most important thing, which was to get veterans off the street,” Powers said. “And for that, I'm happy with the outcome.”
The case stems from a 2015 settlement in which the VA promised to build 1,200 housing units, with more than 770 completed by 2022. The department missed that deadline, prompting the new lawsuit.
Iraq War veteran Rob Reynolds came to the West L.A. VA for PTSD treatment in 2018, met veterans sleeping on the streets outside and began advocating for them.
During Wednesday’s press event, he called this week’s Ninth Circuit ruling “long overdue.”
"There should never have been a lawsuit filed in the first place,” Reynolds said. “ They were using the property for everything but what it was intended for, and that's housing.”
The veteran plaintiffs argued that lack of on-campus housing prevented disabled veterans from accessing physical and mental health services at the facility.
As of late 2024, the VA said there were 307 veteran housing units open on the West L.A. campus and 461 units under construction.
Robert Reynolds (right), a veteran advocate with AMVETS, walks with Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva as they tour the Veterans Row encampment along San Vicente Boulevard in November 2021.
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Commercial leases
The appeals court ruling invalidated most commercial leases on the property, including Brentwood School's 22-acre sports complex and an oil company's drilling license.
However, the court overturned the district court's previous invalidation of UCLA's lease for its baseball stadium. Rosenbaum said he plans to refile that portion of the case, which had been argued on different grounds.
Reynolds criticized local leaders for what he said was inaction at the West L.A. VA Campus. He said local officials’ personal connections to Brentwood School and UCLA played a role.
“ A lot of these special interest groups on the VA land have so much influence politically in Los Angeles,” he said. "That's why you've had a lot of our politicians remain quiet about this."
In May, President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the VA secretary to declare the West L.A. VA campus a national hub for homeless veterans and develop a plan to house 6,000 people there by 2028.
That housing goal is even more ambitious than the court order, but local advocates say they haven’t heard anything from the Trump administration since it was issued.
“They need to speak to the people that actually live on that property,” Reynolds said. “I'm hoping now that we have this Ninth Circuit ruling in, that we'll be able to have some more discussion with the administration and with the VA leadership to try to figure out what the next steps are.”
As a result of this week’s ruling, the case has been sent back to the District Court judge to implement the housing order and oversee construction
The program shuttered after losing federal funding
Destiny Torres
is LAist's general assignment and digital equity reporter.
Published December 24, 2025 2:52 PM
Long Beach Library shut down its youth STEM workshop program, called SEED, following federal funding loss.
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Topline:
Long Beach Library shut down its youth STEM workshop program, called SEED, following federal funding cuts, the city announced Wednesday. As a replacement, the library is launching the LBPL Creativity Lab.
Why did the city lose funding? The program originally was funded for four years with over $400,000 from the U.S. Department of Education, according to the city’s announcement.
What was the SEED program? The STEM learning program was launched in 2022 for middle school youth. In that time, the program served more than 500 students, according to city officials. The program’s final day was Sept. 30.
Why it matters: Local library programs across Los Angeles have disappeared since the federal funding cuts this fall. L.A. County Library shut down its laptop and Wi-Fi hotspot lending programs after the FCC cut off assistance to digital lending programs.
What we know about the Creativity Lab: The lab will focus on arts, culture and technology. Its first session is set to begin next February. The city will release more information in the coming weeks, according to a release.
If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less.
A family at their Victorian-era Christmas dinner, circa 1840.
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Centuries ago, before crooners sang about carols being sung by a fire, Yule meant something different: a pagan mid-winter festival around the solstice, dating back to pre-Christian Germanic people.
Origins of yule festivals: It was particularly important to Scandinavian communities during that time of year, beset by late sunrises and early sunsets, according to Maren Johnson, a professor of Nordic studies at Luther College. Scholars of these early pagan festivals say feasting and drinking were abundant. Animals were slaughtered as part of the sacrifices to gods and spirits typical of these early festivals.
Yule gets co-opted into Christmas: Christianization of this part of Europe, however, changed how people celebrated Yule. The church began to align its own holidays with pagan celebrations, Gunnell said. Easter replaced the festival at the beginning of summer, for example, and St. John's Day replaced midsummer. "And then we hear in Icelandic source material that [Yule] was replaced with Christmas," he said.
On a chilly December night in Sandy Spring, Md., dozens of people crammed into the Woodlawn Manor for a Victorian-era Yuletide dance lesson, the wood floors creaking under the uncertain steps of 21st-century people learning 19th-century English country dances.
"Every good party has dancing," said Angela Yau, a historical interpreter for the parks department who was teaching the dances — and the Victorians loved a good Yuletide shindig.
Angela Yau, a site manager for the Montgomery County parks department who also works in cultural and natural history interpretation, wears an 1840s-style dress while teaching Victorian dances to the room.
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The merriment was emblematic of how many think of Yule; today, it's synonymous with Christmas. But centuries ago, before crooners sang about carols being sung by a fire, Yule meant something different: a pagan mid-winter festival around the solstice, dating back to pre-Christian Germanic people.
It was particularly important to Scandinavian communities during that time of year, beset by late sunrises and early sunsets, according to Maren Johnson, a professor of Nordic studies at Luther College.
"All these kinds of winter traditions are tied very intricately into small communities," she said. "You develop between yourselves a folklore about this winter time and this period of darkness."
In this week's installment of "Word of the Week," we travel back in time to the origins of Yule festivals, and trace those earliest traditions to modern-day Christmas celebrations.
Feasting, drinking and animal sacrifices
Scholars of these early pagan festivals don't have much concrete evidence of what actually went on at them, according to Old Norse translator Jackson Crawford, because much of the written record comes much later from Christians. But what is clear, he said, was that feasting and drinking were abundant.
Terry Gunnell, a professor of folkloristics at the University of Iceland, agrees. Drinking copious amounts of ale was not only encouraged but required, he said, and animals were slaughtered as part of the sacrifices to gods and spirits typical of these early festivals.
"The snow is coming down the mountains and in a sense, the nature spirits are moving closer," he said — and people wanted to appease them.
And then, there was the oath-swearing. Crawford said this was one of the major hallmarks of early Yule celebrations as recorded in myths like The Saga of Hervör and Heidrek from the 13th century. In it, a man swears to the king of Sweden that he'll marry his daughter with no real prospects of doing so.
"But your oaths during Yule are kind of sacred, extra binding," he said. "So he has to try to fulfill it," even though he eventually gets killed.
Crawford thinks that this oath-swearing could be where the word "Yule" actually comes from. The earliest roots could come from Indo-European words for "speaking," he said, and then Germanic peoples came to use it for more judicial purposes like admitting, confessing or swearing.
There's other theories out there, though, the dominant one being that the word could come from the Old Norse word hjól, meaning "wheel" — as in the "wheel of the year" that keeps turning with the seasons, Gunnell said.
Yule gets co-opted into Christmas
Christianization of this part of Europe, however, changed how people celebrated Yule. The church began to align its own holidays with pagan celebrations, Gunnell said. Easter replaced the festival at the beginning of summer, for example, and St. John's Day replaced midsummer. "And then we hear in Icelandic source material that [Yule] was replaced with Christmas," he said.
"So what the church is really doing is to allow people to go on doing what they had done before, but now under a Christian name," he added.
Around the 900s, Crawford said, Scandinavians started saying "Yule" and "Christmas" interchangeably.
"I think it suggests that, fundamentally, both of them are basically parties," he said.
That's not to say that Christmas was the exact same as the Yule celebrations of old. There was a new emphasis, Gunnell said, not so much on winter spirits but "a period of joy with the birth of Christ." But much of the feasting and drinking spirit of Yule stuck around — and became Christmas traditions throughout much of Europe.
Fast forward to the Victorian era, where the spirit of merriment became embedded in English culture, thanks to two important cultural influencers: Prince Albert, who imported traditional Yuletide customs popular in his native Germany, and Queen Victoria.
The queen fell in love with the traditions, Yau of the parks department said. And since she was a fashion icon, "These Christmas traditions really spread from the royal couple out through England and out through the colonies and everywhere else." And, as cultural customs are wont to do, the traditions morphed — creating, among other things, Santa Claus.
Still making sacrifices — just sweeter
Although slaughtering animals to please winter spirits is perhaps less typical of modern Yuletide celebrations, the spirit of sacrifice still remains, according to Gunnell.
That's particularly true in Scandinavian Christmas folklore. People leave out porridge for nisse and tomte, small trickster spirits who live in local forests, around the winter solstice in hopes of placating them or receiving gifts. (Though these days, Johnson said, many Scandinavians also celebrate the Julenisse, more of a Santa Claus figure.)
In Iceland, there's not really a Santa Claus figure at all, Gunnell said. Instead, there's the "Christmas Men," also known as the Yule lads. As the stories have told it, the mystic men – with names like "Window Peeper," "Sausage Swiper," "Bowl Licker" and "Meat Hook" — come one by one down from the mountains by your community, play pranks and steal things from homes. (To be fair to them, they'll also leave presents in windows for children.) On top of that, they have an ogress mother, Grýla, who eats misbehaving children "like sushi for Christmas," Gunnell said.
And although he doesn't swipe sausages or eat children, Santa Claus is not a completely dissimilar figure.
"The idea of sacrifices remains in leaving out a little bit of sherry or whiskey for Santa Claus and some food for the reindeer," Gunnell said.
It's something to consider the next time you leave out cookies and milk.
Copyright 2025 NPR
The Postal Service report estimated that at least 58 million packages were stolen in 2024. What are the odds that one of those packages has medication in it? Here's what to do if your medication gets stolen.
Lower your theft risk: Schedule deliveries for when you're home and having a delivery spot that's hidden are good ideas. Even a locker for your porch that doesn't lock is a good deterrent. If your medication is stolen, report the theft to your prescribing doctor and local law enforcement.
Check your pharmacy's policies: CVS Caremark, another company that ships prescriptions by mail, said it offers customers package tracking to prevent theft, but didn't answer NPR's question about how common medication theft is. Pharmacies, including Walgreens, say they offer order tracking and use discreet packaging to help prevent theft. Customers can also opt to require a signature when their medicines are delivered.
Carmen Peterson's son Ethan is a big fan of Elmo and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. And although Ethan is nonverbal, he loves to sing along in his own way.
"He's a really fun-loving 8-year-old. He doesn't speak, but he gets his point across," Peterson says.
Ethan has a rare genetic disorder — Syngap1 — which, among other things, causes a kind of seizure that can make him drop to the ground without warning.
"Everything just kind of shorts out for a moment," Peterson says. "And the danger of that — and I've seen this — is him falling on hardwood floors, concrete, off of stairs, like all of these things."
She says he's gotten hurt and she's had to rush him to the emergency room.
Ethan takes a medicine called Epidiolex that prevents these seizures. But last holiday season, a thief stole it off the family's front porch in Charlotte, N.C.
Peterson remembers finding the empty box and then checking her Ring doorbell camera footage. "I see this guy walking off … and I am just livid," she says.
Then, she had to figure out how to get this medicine — worth $1,800 — replaced so her son didn't miss a dose. It turned out to be a challenge.
How many stolen packages?
December is a busy time for package deliveries and for porch pirates who steal them. Sometimes the thieves run off with mail-order medication instead of getting an iPad or a Labubu.
E-commerce took off during the pandemic, and December remains the busiest time of the year for package deliveries, according to the U.S. Postal Service.
Still, it can be tricky to get the whole picture when it comes to package theft.
As easy as it is to buy stuff online, getting it to customers is actually really complicated. That's because so many people and companies interact with a package before it's delivered, according to Ben Stickle, a professor of criminal justice administration at Middle Tennessee University.
"So it's really hard to get, you know, what happens from the point that you click a button to when it gets delivered, all put back together with enough detail to find out when and where these thefts are occurring and then actually do something about it," he says.
Stickle worked on a study with the Postal Service published earlier this year, and says that victims of theft wind up reporting it to different places that don't share information with each other or even necessarily record the missing package as "theft." And sometimes victims don't report it at all.
The Postal Service report estimated that at least 58 million packages were stolen in 2024. "So what are the odds that one of those, unbeknownst to the thief, has some type of medication in it?" Nobody really knows for sure, he says.
Ways to lower theft risk
So what can you do? Stickle says scheduling deliveries for when you're home and having a delivery spot that's hidden are good ideas. Even a locker for your porch that doesn't lock is a good deterrent.
"If a thief can see that there's a package, even if it's an envelope on your porch from the roadway, it seems to be far more likely that it's going to be stolen," he says.
According to Express Scripts and Optum Rx, which are two companies that offer mail-order pharmacy services, medication theft is pretty rare.
CVS Caremark, another company that ships prescriptions by mail, said it offers customers package tracking to prevent theft, but didn't answer NPR's question about how common medication theft is.
Pharmacies, including Walgreens, say they offer order tracking and use discreet packaging to help prevent theft. Customers can also opt to require a signature when their medicines are delivered.
Making sure patients don't miss a dose is a top priority, says Stryker Awtry, the director of Loss Prevention and Transformation for Optum Pharmacy, part of Optum Rx.
"Especially during the holiday seasons when deliveries surge, we want to make sure we build in peace of mind for our customers," he says. "So if a theft were to happen, No. 1, contact the pharmacy right away."
He says to also report the theft to your prescribing doctor and local law enforcement.
A lost prescription replaced
As for Carmen Peterson in North Carolina, when she called her insurer's pharmacy to get Ethan's medicine replaced, the answer was no. But Ethan missing a dose and having a seizure that put him in the emergency room again? Not an option for her.
"It's just like it's one of those things that you just don't have a choice," she says.
If forced to, she would have found the money to buy the medicine herself.
"It was just unfortunate that the … company was so ready and kind of willing to just wash their hands of it because they felt like they had done what they were contracted to do, which is deliver the medication."
That company, Liviniti Pharmacy, said it couldn't comment on the Peterson family's experience because of patient privacy laws.
Unwilling to give up, Peterson reported the theft everywhere and made noise about it — including on her local news stations. That worked. Jazz Pharmaceuticals, the company that makes the drug Ethan needs, saw the stories and replaced it for her within a week.
Now, she recommends getting important medicines delivered to a P.O. box, a workplace or just going to the pharmacy to pick it up yourself.
