The Brief

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

A windowless warehouse on the outskirts of Davis shelters pieces of California’s forests.

Icy air swirls and fogs around 42,000 pounds of seeds — the past and the future of these trees, frozen in cardboard boxes. It smells like the woods on a snowy day.

“This is like the mothership of forestry in California right here,” said Stewart McMorrow, staff chief for wildfire resilience at Cal Fire, standing outside the heavy metal door of the state seed bank at Cal Fire’s Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis.

Private landowners especially rely on these seeds — some now more than a half-century old — to reforest property destroyed by wildfire.

At the pace California is burning, it’s nowhere near enough.

Climate change and more than a century of overzealous fire suppression are now fueling wildfires so severe that they’re wiping out the very forests that need fire to thrive — leaving iconic landscapes at risk of turning into brush and scrub, permanently.

Over the past quarter century, high-severity wildfires have burned 2.3 million acres of California’s forestland so completely that the trees are unlikely to return on their own — according to a working draft of the state’s new reforestation strategy obtained by CalMatters.

California is counting on these forests to store carbon, protect water supplies, clean the air, and shelter wildlife. By 2071, one recent analysis reports, half of California’s forest area could be gone.

“Reforestation,” said Malcolm North, a scientist with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station, “is pretty damn important.”

Yet to replant even a quarter of the privately owned forestlands in the state, California would need to increase seed bank capacity by roughly 300%, according to Cal Fire — which means more seeds, more people, more space. And that wouldn’t solve the problem on federal land, which accounts for more than half the forests in the state and most of the lands that need replanting.

CalMatters reviewed a working draft of California’s reforestation strategy; the USDA California Climate Hub is developing it with state and federal agencies, the conservation non-profit American Forests, and the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force.

But both Sacramento and Washington have spent decades letting the money and staff needed to grow back California’s forests wither.

“We need to focus on reforestation as an emergency, as a state,” McMorrow said. “We are slowly losing our forestland, and we’re not catching up.”

Leilani Villeda prepares to fire a weighted line into the high branches of a pine tree using an air-powered launcher during Cone Camp, an annual training session where participants learn how to survey and collect pine cones, in Pollock Pines on July 15, 2026.

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Bleeding the federal workforce

Timber harvests once paid for much of the U.S. Forest Service’s efforts to replant trees.

But as new laws tightened endangered species and other public lands protections, logging in national forests declined. Severe wildfires also increased.

The combination devoured the Forest Service’s resources, and people: from 1998 to 2015, non-fire staff tasked with managing National Forest System lands decreased by 39%, according to a 2015 report.

With ever-increasing demands, a 2022 Forest Service document warned, there is a “critical need” to increase the number of staff “substantially dedicated” to reforestation.

Congress and the Biden Administration unstoppered additional money for a reforestation trust fund in 2021, a move championed by the conservation non-profit American Forests. Just a few years later, the Forest Service reported that it had replanted roughly 285,000 acres nationwide — the highest yearly total in more than a quarter century.

But the need still dwarfs action, and federally-directed work is lengthy and intense. Crews must clear dead and dying trees quickly to reduce the danger to people and the chance of reburns, a Forest Service spokesperson said. Finding seeds and growing seedlings can take a year or two, even before planting.

The federal government’s capacity to replant forests eroded away over time, and it will take time to rebuild it, said Solomon Dobrowski, a professor of landscape ecology at the University of Montana. Dobrowski’s research found that the reforestation gap spans millions of acres across the West and is likely to double or even triple in the coming decades.

“You don’t turn that ship around on a dime,” Dobrowski said.

Instead, the Trump administration cut the Forest Service significantly. The agency lost 20% of its staff last year.

“It just makes me cry at night … it’s basically a child swinging a wrecking ball,” said Hugh Safford, a forest and fire ecologist with the UC Davis Environmental Science and Policy Department and a former regional ecologist for the Forest Service. “Morale is down, capacity already was really minimal.”

And California keeps burning.

Stewart McMorrow, staff chief of wildfire resilience for Cal Fire, opens a box of seeds in the seed bank at the Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis on July 15, 2026.

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A widening gap

The loss of forests “is one of the least-known impacts of climate change and megafires,” said wildfire task force director Patrick Wright.

The draft strategy for California obtained by CalMatters comes with no dedicated funding. The goal, Wright said, is to put every agency and organization trying to replant California’s scorched forests on the same page.

The strategy calls for streamlining planning, prioritizing projects tackling critical human safety concerns and ecosystem issues like water supply, and increasing the supply of seeds, seedlings and workers.

It urges land managers to avoid adding more fuel to the fires, and recommends replanting at lower densities and with more natural spacing instead of the classic, closely-packed “pines in lines” grid. Scientists have linked high-density plantings to high-severity fires.

The most startling pieces, though, come from the draft strategy’s look at the current landscape. California would need to scale up reforestation by 35% annually to meet the state’s existing post-fire replanting goals, which start at 280,000 acres per year in 2030. The increase would take “significant funds,” the report said, because reforestation can cost up to $6,400 an acre.

But the current pace is lagging. Statewide, land managers have replanted roughly 254,000 acres of severely burned forest since 2020 — or around 16% of the area stripped of forest cover by high severity fires between 2020 and 2024 alone. The number is just 8% on federal lands, outside of wilderness areas.

Safford said the numbers are actually even more dire: Factoring in both wilderness areas and excluding forests likely to regrow on their own, his recent study reports that the U.S. Forest Service replanted just 1.2% of the agency’s California lands that wildfire denuded between 2016 and 2023.

It wasn’t always like this, said Safford. The Forest Service’s replanting efforts mostly kept pace with wildfires until around 2006.

“And then,” Safford said, “it just falls to shit.”

‘Nowhere near prepared’

For all the vitriol between Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Donald Trump over the care and raking of California’s forests, state and federal money — and people — often intersect on the landscape.

On California’s end, Cal Fire funds and conducts research, and provides grants for forest restoration on private, state and even federal land. Cal Fire also runs the reforestation center in Davis, where flats of glossy young conifers are gently misted with water in the summer heat.

McMorrow — tall and crisp in his navy Cal Fire uniform — can’t help but dig his hands into the dirt to pull out weeds tangling with the seedlings.

One of the most challenging chokepoints, McMorrow said, is finding the right seeds to grow these seedlings — getting climbers to the right spot, at the right time, to pluck ripe cones from the treetops.

“Believe me, I do it,” said McMorrow, who created a tree-climbing program at Cal Fire. “We are trying to meet the demand that’s in front of us, and it’s crushing.”

Yet the money for Cal Fire’s efforts — cobbled together from the state budget, federal grants and other one-time funds — represents a relatively small and ever-changing fraction of Cal Fire’s multibillion-dollar budget.

The nursery in Davis shut down in the early 2000s, a casualty of across-the-board state budget cuts. Though the seed bank freezer stayed on, the reforestation center didn’t fully reopen until after the Legislature in 2017 tapped a 2012 fee on wood products to bring it back online.

Scaling up and upgrading the facility now carries an estimated $26.2 million price tag; this year’s state budget included about $1.2 million to fund preliminary planning.

Meanwhile, other funding is on the line. California’s climate regulators — chaired by Newsom appointee Lauren Sanchez — voted in May to overhaul a key climate program  in ways that could substantially reduce, or even eliminate, up to $200 million a year for wildfire resilience. Grants for reforestation are among the many competing priorities for this funding.

While the Proposition 4 climate bond includes $1.5 billion for wildfire and forest resilience, state leaders are spending down the bond quickly.

“The truth of the matter is that California is probably, infrastructurally speaking, in a better place than any other western state,” Safford said.

“What that tells you is how piss-poor the capacity is in general in the Western U.S., because California is nowhere near prepared for the scale of this.”

Cone hunting

On the banks of Jenkinson Lake in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Stella Krone and Elyse Wohlenberg wrestled with a slingshot that towered over the two of them. It took their combined strength to slot the bungee into position, then Wohlenberg stepped back.

“All clear?” Krone asked, kneeling in a clearing and pointing the slingshot at a Douglas fir 50 yards away. “Firing!”

Krone, Wohlenberg, and dozens of other hard-hatted people were there, crunching over conifer needles, for Cone Camp — a training program led by American Forests with support from Cal Fire and the Forest Service.

The campers — some forestry professionals, some interested laypeople — peeled off with oversized slingshots and souped-up potato guns to learn how to knock cones loose from tree branches. That’s how they check the cones for ripeness and viability, before sending someone up the tree to collect them for a seed bank.

The problem was, there were hardly any. Last year’s dry cones rattled to the forest floor as Krone and another camper jiggled the rope they’d shot into the canopy.

“So far, not a great cone year,” said Leana Weissberg, American Forests’ California director.

In the clearing, the instructor asked whether the group was ready to try again.

“Let’s go,” Krone said. “We’re cone hunters for a reason.”

When the full moon rises over Death Valley tomorrow night, 98 endurance athletes will begin their 135-mile run across the scorching desert before going over two mountain ranges and finishing up a third at Mount Whitney Portal.

Southern California has always supplied a good portion of the runners taking on the challenge of the Badwater 135 ultramarathon, and this year’s crop of locals includes Danny Westergaard, 67, holder of the longest streak of finishes. He’s completed the race 18 consecutive years. Whether he’d finished his 19th is a big question.

And even as the field of runners in this invitational race gets more and more competitive every year, Westergaard keeps getting asked back.

Danny Westergaard finishing his first Badwater Ultramarathon in 2007, placing 12th.

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'It's a masochist thing'

“I'm foolish enough to keep signing up as long as I can get in, and as long as I'm able to make the cutoffs ... every year I'm thankful that I get in,” he said.

He used to run every day when he was younger and could recover faster. Nowadays, he runs about every other day.

“Typically, I'll do, like, maybe 10 miles, but at a slow pace, and then on the weekend I'll try to do something longer,” he said.

His last race was 227 miles of a 250-mile race. He missed one of the cutoffs, which are landmarks the runners must pass in a certain amount of time in order to continue on. Cutoffs will be an issue this year at Badwater.

Danny Westergaard on a Palos Verdes Estates running trail.

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The race got harder this year

Despite his 18 consecutive Badwater finishes, Westergaard has his work cut out for him to extend his streak. That’s because the long-time 48-hour deadline to cross the finish line has shrunk to just 45 hours.

“It's a definite concern, the 45 hours,” Westergaard said. His first time running Badwater, he finished 12th in 32 hours and 22 minutes. Last year, it took 45 hours and 29 minutes.

There is an additional cutoff imposed by the National Park Service, which operates Death Valley National Park. Runners must pass the 2,000-foot elevation sign on the run up to Towne Pass — at about the 50-mile mark of the race — within 14 hours of starting or they’re out. So no matter the heat, participants have got to persevere.

Every runner at Badwater 135 takes along a wooden stake that, if they have to leave the course for any reason, they can put down to mark the place where to resume the race. Danny Westergaard’s stakes from his 18 past Badwater finishes,

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“And especially if you have a bad spell in there, which a lot of people do at some point, all your downtime, the clock never stops. So if you're sitting, you know, sick trying to recuperate, the clock is still ticking. So you have to find a way to keep moving,” he said.

Westergaard is starting with the first wave of somewhat slower runners at 8 p.m. tomorrow so he has more time to get past the 50-mile cutoff. Other, faster runners start in waves at 9 and 10 p.m. Temperatures are in the high 90s at night before spiking up to well over 115 degrees in the daytime.

And once he makes it out of the desert, there is the final 13-mile steep slog up the mountain to Whitney Portal and the finish line. Some runners can only power hike the road as they near the end of the race.

Beyond the physical and mental challenge, the logistics of getting yourself and your crew safely across the desert heat and mountain climbs makes Badwater 135 an especially difficult race.

How to conquer Badwater 135

Westergaard is a retired aerospace engineer from Palos Verdes Estates — super organized guy — and after 18 consecutive finishes, he and his crew chief Jennifer Drain are dialed in.

He's also got an experienced crew including his daughters Madison and Meagan. They follow him in a rental van as he runs, and they can also run with him as pacers.

The first wave of runners leaves Badwater Basin during the Badwater 135 ultra-marathon race on July 15, 2013 in Death Valley National Park.

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The van stops every mile or so and it's like a Formula 1 pit crew, offering ice, food, energy gels, electrolyte drinks, a fresh shirt, or anti-chafing cream to put down the shorts or any place else that might rub raw in the heat. And then there is his own special recipe made from a sports energy drink powder.

“We'll do a paste, like a pancake batter. And we put it in these 5-ounce flasks, And I'll just take a shot of it. It's great calories and great carbs and protein,” Westergaard said.

He also eats real foods during the race — fish, fruit, watermelon, veggie roll-ups with hummus, sweet potatoes. The crew also has to eat so that has to be purchased in advance and put on ice.

And yes, there is ice, at least 100 pounds of it.

A competitor passes the unofficial thermometer at Furnace Creek Visitor Center during the Badwater 135 ultra-marathon race on July 15, 2013 in Death Valley National Park.

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“We'll bring one big cooler just full of ice 'cause ice is king out there. It's like gold. It's so valuable,” he said.

They also pack blister supplies, extra shoes, headlamps and safety vests — the list goes on and on. All in all, costs for the race can run up to thousands of dollars.

For the past month, Westergaard has been heat training, not just while running on the roads, but baking in his gym’s sauna, for hours at a time.

 “That's a masochist thing, but the harder the training, the easier the race,” he said. “So the more torture you can put yourself in, and simulate race conditions during training, then the more acclimated and prepared you'll be for the race.”

It’s been eight years since Jonathan Gold died, 10 years since City of Gold was released in theaters, and nearly two decades since the he became the first food critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

“Since he died, there have been times when major things have happened either globally or to our city — the pandemic, ICE raids, the L.A. fires,” Laura Gabbert, who directed City of Gold, said.

“The first thing I always think of is, ‘How would Jonathan be writing about this?’ Because you know he would, and I miss his voice,” she said.

Gabbert got to know Gold’s voice well. She began reading Gold’s columns about food and restaurants in the LA Weekly in the 1990s when she moved here.

“It changed how I explored the city. I saw it in a whole new light through his writing,” she said.

Years later, Gabbert’s and Gold’s kids attended the same L.A. school and she’d see him a few times a week. She is a documentary filmmaker whose films take on social issues such as aging, the environment, and AIDS. She pitched a documentary.

Jonathan Gold during the production of the 2015 documentary "City of Gold."

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“He said no to me three different times,” she said.

Gabbert refined her pitch. She said she wanted to make a film about L.A. through his eyes. He said yes. City of Gold premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015 and was released in theaters the year after. It remains an essential document to understand the people and circumstances that contributed to L.A.’s current rich food scene.

Laura Gabbert, left, during production of "City of Gold," with Jonathan Gold.

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He transformed food writing

Gold was born and raised in L.A. The film includes Gold’s descriptions of the L.A. Jewish communities he grew up in, a UCLA commencement speech after his Pulitzer win during which he describes himself as a failed cellist, and interviews with the immigrant founders of L.A. restaurants such as Meals by Genet and Guelaguetza.

“I think that they felt seen and felt acknowledged and felt that their food was important,” Gabbert said of those restaurant owners.

Gold devoted much of his food writing to giving context to what is on the plate: where did the people who made the food grow up, where their recipes came from, how the location of their restaurants impacted the dishes?

“I don't think it's hyperbole to say that Jonathan fundamentally changed food writing,” Gabbert said.

Jonathan Gold during the production of "City of Gold."

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City of Gold explains that Gold mastered a style of writing in which he brought the reader in by speaking directly to them, as in this 2016 review of a Koreatown restaurant: "When you first sip sullungtang, you may recoil at its blandness until somebody remembers to tell you that you are supposed to add sea salt and chopped scallions from canisters on the table," he wrote.

“He democratized it in many ways long before Anthony Bourdain and all the Netflix food TV shows and long, long time before all the influencers out there,” she said.

Gabbert said Gold’s writing taught people to be more adventurous, to have more empathy, to go out and explore L.A. outside of their comfort zones — all traits we could use a lot more of today.

A portion of Sunset Boulevard reopened overnight after LADWP crews finished repairing a water main break in West Hollywood that shut down the area for more than a week.

The water trunk line broke more than a week ago on Thursday, July 16, flooding streets and opening a sinkhole on Sunset Boulevard. LADWP says crews will need to return in the coming weeks to complete permanent paving and other work.

LADWP also said it's accelerating the installation of a new trunk line to replace the 110-year-old pipe. The infrastructure project, which was originally scheduled to begin installation in 2031, is currently “60% designed” and will take approximately four years to complete.

How to get help

Those affected by the water main break can file damage claims with LADWP.

West Hollywood contact info:

• Residents should email safety@weho.org
• Businesses can contact business@weho.org