Category: Pagan Holidays

It took me a while to realize just how strange and unusual the Western concept of the Christmas season is. Like most middle-class children in North America, I spent my first seven years of my life believing in Santa Claus. Even when I learned that Santa wasn’t real, with the real point of the holiday…

Happy belated Imbolc! I’m normally a bit more timely in marking my holidays, but this has been a busy week for me. This week I moved to a new apartment and that is is a big step for me. I won’t say specifically where I moved, but I can say that I’m somewhere on the…

Modern humans in the Christian-dominated Western world have loaded all of their spiritual celebration energy into the months between Thanksgiving and Christmas This can make December in particular both a time of great joy and great stress and even sadness. Most Pagans, through the Wheel of the Year, spread out our seasonal celebration energy evenly…

Preparing for a semi-public Lughnasadh ritual that I’m leading motivated me to dive deeper into the holiday and its origins. I wanted to ensure that I accurately portrayed the tradition. In doing so, I found something much deeper, richer, and more robust than the generic versions of Lughnasadh/Lammas that Internet content farms often promote on…

Imbolc is a Celtic holiday and therefore not native to Wisconsin, but Imbolc in Wisconsin arrives in an interesting way.

11.723 Southlight 44. First of all, a most festive Yule and Winter Solstice. And a festive Litha and Summer Solstice to those south of the Equator. As I write this, my area faces a winter storm and blizzard warning spanning the next two days. Temperatures are supposed to plunge to -20 C and wind chills…