The Aviary

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

- Susan Cooper

It's very foggy where I live today but the sun still came up anyway! Glad Yule, everybody.

One of the things that's not great about being a pagan is the lack of established food traditions for holidays. I like having special food to mark special occasions. So this year, I decided that, okay, I am a solitary practitioner, time to invent my own food traditions.

I like baking, and a lot of my family's holiday food traditions revolve around baked goods, so I'm picking some baking recipes I like that are a little more work than I'd usually do (so I don't make them often), and assigning them to holiday. There's also some recipes that I haven't made before that I'm going to try this year, and keep them if they work.

Disting is this week, so today, I made saffron buns. (Because Disting is the beginning of the end of winter, so it feels appropriate to eat something that's yellow and smells like citrus, for the sun.) I haven't made these before but they smell amazing and I'm very much looking forward to eating them.

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

~Susan Cooper


Glad Yule, everyone.

Things:

- I am so on top of holiday shopping this year - I'm done except for buying a few candy things* the next time I go to the grocery store. I do have the added problem this year of having to put my presents in the actual mail, but that is a problem for Future Sara.

- Today, I am doing a bread experiment wherein, instead of making a loaf of bread for sandwiches this week, I am making the same bread but shaping it into rolls. Which will hopefully not suck, since I will be stuck with them for two weeks if they do.**

- Also, yesterday I made miso chocolate chip cookies and they are great.

- My mom and I both want to knit hats together, so we ordered hat yarn yesterday. Today, I am deeply saddened that my yarn is not already here.





*My sister is dealing with her grief about not being able to spend the holidays with family by pretending that the day is not Christmas but is instead a holiday she made up called St Hammington's Day. (She and her spouse are making a ham.) Therefore, I have bought pig stickers to put all over their presents and am including a marzipan pig each.

**When I make bread, I put half of it in the freezer. Half a loaf is enough for me to make 5 sandwiches - one for each work day - and that way the other half doesn't go bad before I can eat it, so one loaf lasts for two weeks. This is a great time saver, but does mean that, if I'm not crazy about the bread, I still have to eat it for two whole weeks.

I'm celebrating Ostara today. ( Cut for religious stuff )

Things:

- A week ago, my choir director asked me if I would mind singing the descant on one of our pieces. I sang it properly for the first time during rehearsal last night and was awesome at it, so that's cool.

- This weekend, on a whim, I decided to pick up my Dark Tower reread at the point I last left off three years ago and thus am now reading Wolves of the Calla*. This is very exciting because a) I love everything about these books to the point that I occasionally have to take a break from reading just to have emotions about, like, the existence (or lack thereof) of Gilead and also b) so, I've read the first 4 books in this series a bunch of times and the last three only once each, when they came out. Which means I have forgotten a hell of a lot of stuff that happens in Wolves and am constantly surprised by it. It's delightful. (Less delightful is the fact that Calla Bryn Sturgis has a very strong dialect that I can feel creeping into my thought patterns as I read and I'm trying really hard not to let it come out my mouth.)

- Tomorrow is May Day and I have taken the day off work because it is a holiday. I'm going to go for a hike on the beach in the morning and then come home and watch The Wicker Man, as is a right and proper celebration of the day.






*Okay, no, I broke off the reread in the middle of Wind Through the Keyhole because it wasn't grabbing me like the others - right after Wizard and Glass, another big flashback was too much - and so I still haven't actually ever finished that one. Maybe I'll read it after the end this time.

Hey guys, it's the Autumnal Equinox!* Which is...not really a thing, in heathen circles, but I enjoy the symmetry of the Wheel of the Year, so I like to keep it as a holiday. I tend to think of it as good day to honor Idunna, since it falls during apple harvest time. So I am making stewed apples today and have decided to tell you a story.

This is the only myth about Idunna that we really have. It's in the Prose Edda, if you want to read the original. (Though I'll admit that it's been long enough since I read the Prose Edda that I'm just telling the story the way I remember it and like to tell it. So there may be differences, I don't know.) It is also a Loki story, because all the really good stories are.



( The Theft of Idunna and the Golden Apples )




So, it feels a little weird to stop there and not tell the aftermath of Thjazi's death, but that's a different story that Idunna's not in at all, so maybe we'll save that for another time.

Happy Autumn, everybody!





*Or the Vernal Equinox, if you live in the south. Sorry, I don't have a story for you guys today.

Things:

- So that "posting every day in December" thing didn't work out. Ah well. Holidays screw things up a little.

- Tangentially - so, hey, holidays! My Christmas went quite well. We had fun family times and good food, I received many pairs of socks and bars of soap*, some beautiful stationery paper and fountain pen ink, and a new book on monster movies. Plus, a PEZ dispenser shaped like the Flash! We played a lot of Uno and ate a lot of cookies and Megan played the Marty Robbins pandora station a lot. Good times. I hope that you all had a nice time as well, whatever you may or may not be celebrating at this time of year.

- Also, we went to see Into the Woods. Which I have some quibbles with, ( which are under here, ) but generally enjoyed. Also, the staging of Agony alone is worth the price of admission, so there's that.

- Yesterday, I bought three tiny colorful cactuses for my windowsill because I decided that I needed more plant life around. And then I remembered that I had bought flower seeds this summer for indoor planting and never used them, so now they are in pots on my windowsill. They may not grow, as it is midwinter, but the possibility pleases me.

- I did some Christmas knitting this year - a pair of socks for Dad - and it came down to the wire a little in that I didn't finished them till Christmas Eve. (We open presents on Christmas Eve, to give you some perspective.) Pressured knitting is no fun, but it did remind me that I love making socks and haven't done so in a which. And I have a lot of sock yarn that I haven't knit up yet. So now I am knitting some socks with this yarn, which was given to me three years ago. They are mildly hideous and I love them. And I am not allowed to buy anymore sock yarn until I knit the yarn I have.

- I am pretty sanguine about going back to work today, but there is still a part of me that want to stay home, get out all my dvds of monster movies, and have a day-long marathon. I feel like I need some black and white vampires and beautiful staircases.




*I suppose it is a sign of adulthood that I asked for those things. Most of the socks have monsters or dinosaurs on them, though.

The Shortest Day

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

~Susan Cooper

Glad Yule, everybody.

The Shortest Day

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

~Susan Cooper

The Shortest Day

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

~Susan Cooper


The sun came up, everybody! Happy Yule!

I wrote up this big long post about how I was feeling kinda growly about being surrounded by Christmas and how that makes me feel tired and cranky but by dint of writing the post, I started to feel better. Because now I am thinking about Yule instead.

You guys, Yule is my favorite religious* holiday. Which is pretty great because it is the most important heathen holiday. 8) So now I am going to tell you about some of the things I love about Yule.

- I love Mothernight, which is the first night of Yule. Heathen holidays start at sundown the night before, so I celebrate Mothernight on the evening of the 20th. It's for remembering your disir (basically, your female ancestors, though that's not entirely accurate) and All-Mother Frigga, and her 12 handmaidens. Next to Loki, Frigga is the deity I talk to the most, so Mothernight is pretty important to me.

- Yule is also a time when I try to honor Mother Holda, who blesses the industrious. She's heavily associated with spinning and in some places, it was traditional to have all your spinning done by Yule, in order to receive Holda's blessing. I don't spin, but I do crochet and knit, so I try to have all of my current projects done before Mothernight. (I didn't manage it last year, but I think I'll be able to this year.) I like this because it's both a reason to work hard and get things finished and a reason to remember that I get to rest when I need to.

- I like the solstice morning. I don't stay up all night (though some year, I'd like to try it), but I get up before sunrise and make a cup of tea or something else hot and I go outside to watch the sunrise. I usually say a few things to greet the sun or sing a song, and I make a toast. (We are big on toasts, heathens.) And it's important. Literally, of course, there is not a giant wolf chasing the goddess Sunna across the sky. But mythologically, metaphorically? There is some bad shit out there, and some bad shit happened this year and the sun rising symbolically means that we got through it, one more time. The night is long and dark, but the sun rises. Life chose us again this year. We are not lost.

- So, party time! Yule is sacred to Freyr and Freyja, who are party gods. They are gods of life and love and frith and wealth, so I get to celebrate them by eating as much as I want and having a good time. One of the things I like about heathenry is its attitude toward wealth. Which is, basically, wealth is good. Greed is bad. Of course you want to have nice things but when you have nice things, you should share them. (Not sharing turns you into a dragon, which is generally to be avoided.) I like that heathenry is charitable without being ascetic.

- It's hard to know whether presents at Yule are traditional or not, but presents are awesome, so who cares? I love giving presents to people I care about and I'm lucky enough to be able to. I like being able to share that luck.

- I like that Yule is so long. It's twelve whole days long, this long space between the old year and the new when we get to rest and relax and regroup for the year that's coming. It's a good space to make plans and figure out how to do better. I keep thinking that, one year, I'm going to take the whole twelve days off from work, but I haven't done that yet. I've got the first six days off this year, though, so that's awesome.

- I like that, if I start the count from December 21st, Yule ends on January 1st. That's not particularly important, but I find it pleasing. 8)

- Yule is always the time that I feel closest to the gods. Which makes sense - the gods are called "Yule-beings", after all. It is, for me, the holiest time of year: the darkest, the brightest, the most profound, the most full of simple pleasures and good things.



So. Yule is pretty great. I'm looking forward to it.





*Modifier added because of Halloween, which does has some religious aspects for me and I usually celebrate Winternights concurrently, but is not in itself a religious holiday.

Things:

- I had pumpkin pickles in my lunch today. They were fabulous. They are from an overflow jar that didn't get processed, so I haven't actually eaten any of the pickles that got properly canned. I don't know how much that will affect the experience, but I imagine that they will also be excellent.

- A week or so ago, I made these because they are adorable and today I am wearing them. It's not quite cold enough for them but they make me smile every time they peek out from under my skirt. Which is the important thing, really.

- I bought pumpkin spice caramels and chocolate-covered caramel corn at the grocery store this morning. Autumn candy is the best candy.

- I have at least started all but one of my Christmas knitting projects and the one left is only because I just decided to do it yesterday and haven't acquired yarn yet. On two of them, I am practically halfway done already. There will be no stressful last minute holiday knitting for me this year!

- You guys, tomorrow is Halloween! I don't have big plans, really, but there will probably be candy and scary movies - I'm kinda having a Hellraiser craving - and possibly I will play Arkham Horror. Sounds pretty good. (Although there is probably something wrong with the idea of doing Christmas knitting while watching Hellraiser. Hopefully, there will be no Cenobite-ish contamination.)



So far, it is a pretty good day.