"Surprise, Mommy!" Winterbelle shouted, seeing her mother at the door and not noticing until the next moment the two unanticipated guests. "Happy Yule," she added more demurely. (57)

While the style of writing makes this an amusing scene, it is anything but amusing to the three adults who behold it. Pippa suddenly sees her daughter through a stranger's eyes and is disturbed for the first time. The two strangers are even more disturbed; their worst fears have been realized. Winterbelle is separated from Pippa, clothes rapidly packed, and she is removed, while Pippa hears phrases like, "Ms. Rede[…], is it true that you have stated to third parties on a number of separate occasions that you practice witchcraft?" and "Is it also true that you participate regularly in rituals of a Satanic nature, in which minors are subjected to treatment that may be regarded as humiliating, painful and/or injurious?" (59). Shocked, Pippa cannot answer ("even granting that such a question deserved on, which she was not sure about"), until it finally sinks in: they're taking Winterbelle away from her on the grounds of "harmful environmental influences" upon Winterbelle's "health and emotional security". And Pippa attacks the doctor physically, the primal rage of a mother whose family is threatened surging to the fore where words are incapable of countering the physical action of Winterbelle being taken away.

It's every parent's worst nightmare - having their child taken away because of doubt cast upon their abilities to raise them. In our society, however, Pagan children experience difficulties experienced by any religious minority: antagonism based on ignorance and assumptions. Every Pagan parent, then, has a nightmare that has different expression: what if they take my child away because they say my religion of choice is not only invalid but harmful?

When the story is released, Pippa proceeds to lose family, friends, job and housing. People turn away from her, embarrassed but unwilling to make the gesture of solidarity in a small town where they fear to be judged by association. A motley collection of a laughable lawyer, two flamboyant Witches with dreadful fashion sense, and a teenage boy whose mother spearheads one of the witch-burning committees in the town stand by Pippa, as does an elderly woman of the town who offers her an old family cottage on the mountainside as refuge when she is turned out of her home.

The mountain offers Pippa succor and comfort. Here she finds strength in the bleak winter; here she performs her Yule ritual by firelight, stripping defiantly in the below-freezing night air, allowing herself to revel in what she has been ostracized for, raising power and connecting with the world around her to gain the energy she needs to stand tall and fight back.

The whole novel revolves around ignorance, discrimination and the over-reliance on pop psychology, the stereotypical single-mom-against-the-world and the very real fear of losing one's child. It also, however, look sat the Pagan community. Again, you get your stereotypes, but Grant's turn of phrase makes you think twice about it:

… [T]oday had been Yule.