By Fire Well and Tree

If you are one of the two or three people who read my stuff, you'll know already that I don't find calendar dates to be particularly useful for anything besides making sure folks are on the same page to do stuff.  As far as the natural world, and the spirituality I find there, I prefer to let nature tell me stuff.   Of course, if I had the time to devote the equivalent of a full-time job to studying these things, I wouldn't need to avail myself of Googling stuff, although I definitely appreciate the  astrology website I use.   (Really wish I paid attention in geometry class...if I'd have only known...) The solstice and equinoxes, moon going from dark to full and back again.... none of that cares about the date on a page.   BUT, the cross quarter days are a little harder, so I look to my land. We haven't had much of a midwinter thaw. We got lots of cold and snow around Yule, and then we've been somewhat consistently in the 40s-ish.  MAYBE we dipped...

Photo by Riccardo: https://www.pexels.com/photo/ice-river-photography-300857/ GOOD NEWS!  I found a web page (two actually) that has reconstructed an Anglo-Saxon calendar. The good news is that I wasn't far off with my own haphazard timing of things.   This  is the one I'm using. The other one is only off by a day, and seems to be depending upon whether they are starting it when the moon is dark, or just the first sliver.  Either way, I can now assign those brains cells to other things. For our month names.. The Anglo-Saxon month is Solmōnaþ, which seems to be "mud month" or "month of hearth cakes."  Commentators I read seemed to think these hearth cakes were mud-like so that would be the two names?  From the Gauls, it is Rivros (Riuros), which is "cold month," and the Almanac terms the full moon for this month "Snow Moon."   I sense a theme.... Kondratiev's next line from the Song of Amergin is "I am a lake on a plain."  He...

 <insert photo of Twelfth Night altar> While my liturgical year ended and began two months ago, the rest of the world* turned the page two days ago.  And so, the Twelfth Night of my Yule celebration conveniently coincides with New Year's Eve. As the five or ten of you who read along regularly know, I like to have a party that evening to celebrate.  It can be a bit much for this introvert, but I do it because I genuinely love hosting and making food and serving beverages to those that I care about.  Yuletide, and really all our holidays, began as group and family activities, and while I have done these things solo, it doesn't really put the cap on the season the same way.   Our whole Yuletide season prefaces with the Krampus walk on the first Sunday in December. One grove member has a Wassail party soon thereafter to really kick things off, and then I bookend it on the other side, and then usually Yule and Winter Solstice rites in between.  During...