Not a lot of British people know this, but December 13th is the Feast of St Lucy, a young girl who died under the Roman persecution of Christians in the 4th century. Until a few centuries ago, under the Julian calendar that preceded the modern Gregorian one, St Lucy’s Day was also the shortest day, […]
Behind the Christian, the pagan: it’s now generally accepted that the origins of Advent and Christmas lie in the midwinter festivals celebrated by ancient cultures. The pagan take on Advent is pretty familiar to anyone concerned with the interplay between nature and the human: it’s the season that approaches the turn of the year, moving […]
They say that moving is one of the most stressful things you can do. It’s up there, in the research, after bereavement and divorce, as one of the great life-events that shake your world. The articles list the sources of stress with empathic relish: the buying and selling of houses, the packing of boxes, the […]
The autumn equinox – one of two days in the year when day and night are of equal length and which, in the pagan tradition, marks the beginning of the dark half of the year, comes as Christian churches celebrate the gathering in of the crops with the Harvest Festival. This year, for me, it’s […]
There he lived with only a deer for company – according to some legends, the hind provided the under-nourished hermit with milk – until one day he was wounded by a stray arrow from a royal hunting party. Refusing all worldly inducements, he went on to found a forest monastery under the Rule of St […]
This year’s summer solstice is a special one. First and famously, as it’s all over the media, this year’s longest day coincides with a full moon. This is rare: it last happened in 1967, and won’t happen again until 2062, by which time I’ll almost certainly be stardust. I like that there’s a growing custom, […]
It’s apple season again! No, I haven’t lost the seasonal plot – I’m refering to the brief window of winter for planting bare rooted trees, when the ground is no longer frost-hardened but before the spring growth kicks in. This year, with a new garden staring needfully at me, I’m doing just that. Fruit trees […]
It’s pre-spring, the second half of winter, the season of nothing-happening, when it’s mostly grey and rainy or cold. For me, this was always a blank time of the year until I discovered, through researching British neo-paganism, Imbolc, the festival that lies halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox and is celebrated at […]
January 17th – the old Twelfth Night – is traditionally the time for wassailing, the Anglo-Saxon custom of visiting the local orchard to awaken the apple trees and scare away any evil spirits who might threaten the crop. From ‘waes hael’ meaning ‘good health’, wassailing is basically a drinking ritual aimed at fostering fruitfulness in […]
Forget Star Wars; may the Yule be with you. People have been marking the winter solstice throughout history, the Romans with the revelry of Saturnalia, the early Scandinavians with the Feast of Yule. I love the different and strange ways humans have of marking the fact that, once a year in the northern hemisphere, the […]