Happy Winter Solstice!

Ahhh... The Spirit of the Holidays...

Yes, I know it's Christmas, usually. But I fall under one of those 'other' catagories-- of the 'Winter Solstice' variety. Which is tomorrow, by the way. December 21st, shortest day of the year if you consider the sun's presence important. Which, of course, it most assuredly is. It's the only one like it in the solar system, which is a good thing-- and from my understanding not all galaxies have one in the gooey center like we do. And here we are, third blue marble from the sun, probably owing it every single thought we have in our little brains. Owing it our very existence.

Here are some goodies from the pages of the Welsh Witch:

As everyone has heard I am sure, Christmas has always been more Pagan than Christian, with it's associations of Celtic fertility rites and Roman Mithraism. That is why both Martin Luther and John Calvin abhorred it, why the Puritans refused to acknowledge it, much less celebrate it (to them, no day of the year could be more holy than the Sabbath), and why it was even made ILLEGAL in Boston! The holiday was already too closely associated with the birth of older Pagan gods and heroes. And many of them (like Oedipus, Theseus, Hercules, Perseus, Jason, Dionysus, Apollo, Mithra, Horus and even Arthur) possessed a narrative of birth, death, and resurrection that was uncomfortably close to that of Jesus. And to make matters worse, many of them pre-dated the Christian Savior.

Ultimately, of course, the holiday is rooted deeply in the cycle of the year. It is the Winter Solstice that is being celebrated, seed-time of the year, the longest night and shortest day. It is the birthday of the new Sun King, the Son of God -- by whatever name you choose to call him. On this darkest of nights, the Goddess becomes the Great Mother and once again gives birth. And it makes perfect poetic sense that on the longest night of the winter, 'the dark night of our souls', there springs the new spark of hope, the Sacred Fire, the Light of the World, the Coel Coeth.

That is why Wiccans have as much right to claim this holiday as Christians. Perhaps even more so, as the Christians were rather late in laying claim to it, and tried more than once to reject it. There had been a tradition in the West that Mary bore the child Jesus on the twenty-fifth day, but no one could seem to decide on the month. Finally, in 320 C.E., the Catholic Fathers in Rome decided to make it December, in an effort to co-opt the Mithraic celebration of the Romans and the Yule celebrations of the Celts and Saxons.

There was never much pretense that the date they finally chose was historically accurate. Shepherds just don't 'tend their flocks by night' in the high pastures in the dead of winter! But if one wishes to use the New Testament as historical evidence, this reference may point to sometime in the spring as the time of Jesus' birth. This is because the lambing season occurs in the spring and that is the only time when shepherds are likely to 'watch their flocks by night' -- to make sure the lambing goes well. Knowing this, the Eastern half of the Church continued to reject December 25, preferring a 'movable date' fixed by their astrologers according to the moon.

Thus, despite its shaky start (for over three centuries, no one knew when Jesus was supposed to have been born!), December 25 finally began to catch on. By 529, it was a civic holiday, and all work or public business (except that of cooks, bakers, or any that contributed to the delight of the holiday) was prohibited by the Emperor Justinian. In 563, the Council of Braga forbade fasting on Christmas Day, and four years later the Council of Tours proclaimed the twelve days from December 25 to Epiphany as a sacred, festive season. This last point is perhaps the hardest to impress upon the modern reader, who is lucky to get a single day off work. Christmas, in the Middle Ages, was not a SINGLE day, but rather a period of TWELVE days, from December 25 to January 6. The Twelve Days of Christmas, in fact. It is certainly lamentable that the modern world has abandoned this approach, along with the popular Twelfth Night celebrations.

Of course, the Christian version of the holiday spread to many countries no faster than Christianity itself, which means that 'Christmas' wasn't celebrated in Ireland until the late fifth century; in England, Switzerland, and Austria until the seventh; in Germany until the eighth; and in the Slavic lands until the ninth and tenth. Not that these countries lacked their own mid-winter celebrations of Yuletide. Long before the world had heard of Jesus, Pagans had been observing the season by bringing in the Yule log, wishing on it, and lighting it from the remains of last year's log. Riddles were posed and answered, magic and rituals were practiced, wild boars were sacrificed and consumed along with large quantities of liquor, corn dollies were carried from house to house while caroling, fertility rites were practiced (girls standing under a sprig of mistletoe were subject to a bit more than a kiss), and divinations were cast for the coming Spring. Many of these Pagan customs, in an appropriately watered-down form, have entered the mainstream of Christian celebration, though most celebrants do not realize (or do not mention it, if they do) their origins.

For modern Witches, Yule (from the Anglo-Saxon 'Yula', meaning 'wheel' of the year) is usually celebrated on the actual Winter Solstice, which may vary by a few days, though it usually occurs on or around December 21st. It is a Lesser Sabbat or Lower Holiday in the modern Pagan calendar, one of the four quarter-days of the year, but a very important one. This year it occurs on December 21st. Pagan customs are still enthusiastically followed. Once, the Yule log had been the center of the celebration. It was lighted on the eve of the solstice (it should light on the first try) and must be kept burning for twelve hours, for good luck. It should be made of ash. Later, the Yule log was replaced by the Yule tree but, instead of burning it, burning candles were placed on it.(Now, of course, we use a cut tree and electric lights...) http://www.tylwythteg.com/index.html



She makes for such interesting reading late at night while I watch the lights flicker on my 'Yule' tree. Here's to warmth in the home, love among family members, potent potables and lastly to the sun, may it come back to warm us more and more each day, to make the plants grow, the air stir, the water evaporate, and the world THRIVE as we know it. Goddess bless us, every one.

A Four-Legged Love

There were many things that happened, imagination-wise, after the 'emergence'. Perhaps one of the most significant- due to the fact that we lived next door to a family that owned two horses, one smaller reddish one and one larger white with grey spots- was that I started to ride a phantom horse everywhere I went in my mind.

My mother told me that I loved horses since before I even knew to CALL them horses. I would just point and point at them in books, and gravitate towards them in all things. She told me a story about looking out the window in the living room one day when I was walking to school, and watching me-- at the tender age of five or six-- walk up to the larger white horse without a trace of tepidation, which was staked out to graze alongside our driveway, and talk to it, reach up and pet its large velevety nose. She said her heart was in her throat, as she was moving out the door but I was already next to it, barely coming up to its knees in height, and she stared- completely amazed- as that big old horse just looked down on me and sniffed my hand and didn't move a muscle. After a few moments he just went back to grazing, letting me pet his neck and mane.



The neighbors noticed this infatuation pretty quickly, and one of the younger girls came out one afternoon, seeing me picking tufts of grass and holding it under the horse's mouth, watching those large, soft lips grasp at the tiny strands next to my delicate fingers, never biting me, always knowing where to stop... and she asked me if I wanted to ride him. I don't think I even said anything, just nodded with that glassy look in my eyes. She picked me up and put me across that broad, white back and tossed nonchalant advice at me that I never, ever forgot in all my horseback-riding days to follow. "Hang on with your legs!"

It wasn't like when I ask my son- bless his heart, for he is very intelligent in many ways- to please get me something from the kitchen and he goes in there three times, NOT finding it and eventually asks me to come help him, and the thing is right where I directed him it would be, just slightly underneath something else... No, it wasn't like that in the least. I KNEW what she meant, and did as she told me, as though some ancient knowledge rose up from the depths of my mind and reminded me- from lessons learned in some other lifetime- how to match the movement of a horse.

It was one of the few times in my young life that I felt like I was EXACTLY where I was supposed to be.

She paraded me around their yard for what felt like forever, and I stared down at the horse, watched its ears, fell in love with the feel of the movement underneath me, the subtle shifts of balance with every step, the push and pull of muscle beneath my legs. It was magic.

A horse became my close familiar after that, and every now and again, especially walking to or from school (which was only a quarter of a mile away) I conjured up the feeling of one underneath me, and at times became the horse myself. I taught myself how to run with a skip in my step that clapped my back foot against my front foot, giving me the third click that imitated the sound of a horse's cantering gate.

The noble and beautiful horse was my first true love, and would stick with me for the rest of my life. Even now, at the ripe age of thirty four, when I go for a walk and hit a particularly steep hill, I pull against it as though I were a horse digging in its hooves. When my son was little enough to carry on my back in a pack....yes, you guessed it. I was a horse going everywhere with a precious rider upon me. It's been a while since I did the hoofbeat skip. Perhaps I will give it a go down the Christmas tree aisle at work today, to see if I can still get that clippety clop going.

The Tiger and the Little Body Mechanics

The World of Imagination…
The Home of Day Dreams…
La La Land.

There are two things that come to mind defining the ‘beginning’ of these sojourns that would, in essence, become a soundtrack to the rest of my life. I would like to be able to say that one of them was THE one, the christening as it were, but I cannot honestly recall which came first.

What seems to strike me as the strongest of the two instances occurred outside my childhood home in upstate New York. I must have been…oh, five or six, maybe. Perhaps younger. You know how all those formative years can sometimes mush together. I remember distinctly that I did NOT want to go inside, and that could have been for any number of reasons.

So this left me OUTSIDE, for most of the afternoon. Bored to tears. Sitting on the front steps of the house and looking around, wondering what I should do with myself. I don’t think I had a bike yet, and my brother was probably inside, too young to play with. No Gameboy Advanced. Just me, adrift in the world of the front yard.

I know I used to talk to myself, as though there were several people in my head, almost constantly. (Could I have been channeling someone? What a pleasant thought…) And rich though the conversations would be, even this sometimes did not suffice—not just the talking. I had a peculiar feeling that there was another level to this ‘make believe’ stuff.

A dark and shady area caught my roving eye. It was the middle of summer, the sun was high, and this dark place looked cool and inviting to me. It was one of those patches of lawn that got cut only once or twice a year, because it was situated in a spot that was not easily reached via mower, and this was, of course, back when weed eaters were not a common household item, if they’d been invented at all. We’re talking early seventies, here. Color TV’s were just becoming ALL the rage.

So the grass was thick and high, almost to my waist, flopping over onto itself. The little thicket went all the way back behind the house, crowded on one side by a heavy overgrowth of bushes, and on the other side, the foundation of the house supported it.

I knelt down and peered into the shadowy depths. My father was a hunter, and had caught many animals, killing most of them except for some raccoons that he trained the dogs with. I’d seen squirrels, rabbits, deer, all manner of dogs and cats… I was already well versed in the world of creatures, and the thought of one lurking in the grass did not bother me in the least.

Pushing into the depths, I started to gently create a tunnel, actually weaving the grass together at the top to secure the ‘roof’. I kept my eye out for any angry bugs, but soon did not care at all about anything other than immersing myself in my den.

There was a tiger in there, I was sure of it. I could hear her growling, panting from the heat of the day. Once I’d tunneled back to a depth that allowed only the bottoms of my shoes to remain in the cut part of the lawn, I could see her bright yellow-green eyes in the shadows. She did not frighten me, nor did I believe she wanted to hurt me in any way.

Seeing me, looking into my eyes and watching my hands weaving their way back into the dark earthy depths of the grass, she knew I was there to keep her company, that I was cub come to share her den with her.



I tunneled so far back into that thicket of grass that when my mom came out to look for me, she couldn’t find me for several minutes. I let her call for me, savoring my great hiding place, knowing that, for those few seconds before guilt would overwhelm me and I would poke my head out and answer her, I was blissfully IN my little world, one that I had created myself and shared with my tigress.

For me, it was the first little toehold in La La Land. Every chance I got, I retired to the tiger’s den that summer, luxuriating in the absolute safeness of it.

The second thing that I recall of such significance occurred while I was falling asleep one night. Part dream, part mental meandering, I lay there seeing myself in my bed, as though from some point beside my prostrate body. The bedroom window was slightly open, and the room was very dark, lit only by a faint amount of moonlight.

There was movement on the windowsill. Again, fear did not play into it, as I watched tiny little men come streaming in from the darkness outside. They were about four inches tall, and almost all of them carried strange looking tools. Most had large noses and ears for their faces, wore hats and striped clothing, pants with suspenders and tiny shoes. Some had beards of grey or black or blonde. They made a ‘B’ line for my bed, jumping from windowsill to nightstand, to dresser, to pillow.

Much to my amazement, a few of them went to work on what appeared to be hidden hatches magically opened in my skin. The little men went right to it as though they did this every night, pulling out all sorts of wires and gadgetry out of my arms and legs and back and head. They were fixing me, rejuvenating me from my long day, replacing parts that had too much wear and tear on them. They spoke to each other in a strange language, some helping each other, some giving orders, until they appeared to be wrapping it up after a while. A couple of them were even brushing my hair out for me.

One of them tipped his hat to the ‘spirit’ me standing there surveying the scene, as if to say, “She’s all yours again… until next checkup…” And then they had gone back out into the night. After that, I was convinced that the little men came every night and performed this service on me, because I was a special being from another planet and all of us from that planet had to have this treatment in order to go from day to day.



It feels good to put these experiences into words, to have them recorded somewhere. They were so significant to me—such eye-opening visions. I remember that it wasn’t just play during these particular times… I stared over that tenuous lip of utter belief into the gaping, wide maw of an imaginary realm… and dove in as often as I could from then on.