Quick Specs
- Format: Small kit edition, boxed deck with guidebook
- Deck Style: Rider-Waite-Smith style
- Card Count: 78 cards
- Author: Kristoffer Hughes
- Illustrator: Erin O’Leary Brown
- Brand: Llewellyn Publications
- ISBN: 9780738784960
Inside the Yuletide Tarot Small Kit Edition
Yuletide Tarot turns the tarot into a midwinter deck inside the Rider-Waite-Smith framework. The 78 cards follow the standard layout of 22 Major Arcana and four suits of fourteen. Those suits become candles for wands, good cheer for cups, canes for swords and gifts for pentacles, so every Minor Arcana card carries a piece of the holiday while keeping its number and role. The Major Arcana take their names from midwinter figures and symbols. On the box art, Sinterklaas stands in the place the Hierophant holds at V, and Mistletoe takes the Lovers’ place at VI, which means a reader who knows the traditional order can find their way around at once. The publisher describes the result as honoring the holiday while staying true to Rider-Waite-Smith style, and its pitch is hope, warmth and cheer for the most wonderful time of the year. The pictures stay in that register: snow, candlelight, wrapped gifts and animals gathered around figures from the season. The Roman numeral on each Major Arcana card does the work of the old title, so the order is easy to follow. The costume changes, and the cards underneath keep working.
Erin O’Leary Brown’s art is wintery and storybook-like. The Sinterklaas card places a figure in a red bishop’s robe, with a staff and a long white beard, on snowy ground between bare trees, with a fox, a deer and a rabbit near his feet and small animals in the branches. On the Mistletoe card, a couple embrace beneath a sprig, with bare branches around them. Another card shows a wreath on a dark door and a wrapped gift waiting on the step. The palette runs through snow white, slate blue and holly red, and each card names its subject on a gray band at the foot. The box matches. It looks like a parcel in kraft-paper brown, with a candlelit tree above a scatter of toys and wrapped gifts, and faint postmarks and handling stamps. Beside it sits a sleeve in red and green candy-cane stripes, with a green-gowned figure holding holly. The look is nostalgic, the kind of imagery you’d expect on a holiday card, now carrying a full tarot.
Practical Ritual Applications
The Candles suit invites a reading by candlelight. Light a candle in a safe holder on a heatproof surface, keep the cards well away from the flame, and draw one card each evening of December as a small daily practice. A three-card spread over the year’s turning works well: the year behind you, the season you’re in, and the year ahead. Keep reversals in these readings too. Read one as the same scene with its warmth held back or turned inward. If you like candlelight with your cards, my candles and accessories collection has options to browse, and the guidebook is there when you want to look up a card’s meaning. At the turn of the year, a single card drawn for the months ahead makes a tidy ritual of closing the old calendar and opening the new one.
How to Read with the Yuletide Tarot
Meet the suits and the Major Arcana first, then try a short first reading.
- Meet the Suits and the Major Arcana
Go through the cards face up, starting with the Major Arcana and then the four suits of candles, good cheer, canes and gifts. As you go, match each Major Arcana card to the traditional figure whose place it takes, using its number as your guide. Read the guidebook's opening pages before you read for anyone else. A short evening spent this way makes the deck's names feel familiar.
- Draw a Card with Reversals Included
Shuffle in your usual way, then fan the deck face down and draw a card with a question in mind. To let reversals fall naturally, deal the shuffled deck into four rough piles, turn two of them end for end, and gather them in any order. Place the card as it falls, upright or reversed. A reversed card is part of the reading, and it asks where the card's cheer stays hidden.
- Close the Reading with a Note
Read the card's name and look at the scene: the weather, the light, any gift or animal in view. Say what the picture suggests, then check the guidebook for its meaning. Write one line about the card and the date, and keep the notes together through the season. When the season ends, read them back in order and see what changed.
The Tarot Fellow Standard
I stock the Small Kit Edition of Yuletide Tarot because the holiday theme sits on top of a tarot that still works: the Major Arcana keep their numbers and roles, the suits keep their meanings under new names, and the format is small enough for a stocking. Themed decks earn a place when the framework underneath stays intact, and this one does. If you want a deck that brings the holiday to the table, it’s an easy choice, and my tarot decks collection has more decks to compare it against.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Small Kit Edition is a smaller, stocking-sized edition of the Yuletide Tarot, which first came out in 2023. Its box measures about 3.3 by 5 inches and 1.8 inches deep, while the original kit's box is about 5.7 by 8.3 inches and 2.1 inches deep, so the new set takes far less room in a bag, on a shelf or in a stocking.
Yes. The Small Kit Edition includes a 164-page guidebook in English by Kristoffer Hughes, packed in the box with the 78 cards, so you can start reading without a separate book. Because the deck follows the Rider-Waite-Smith style, any general Rider-Waite-Smith book is a useful second reference for a card.
Yuletide means the season of Yule, which is itself an old name for Christmastide. Yule descends from Old English and is related to the Old Norse name of a midwinter feast that Christian observance later absorbed. English still uses the word for Christmas and the Christmas season, which is the setting for this deck's winter imagery.
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