Tag: Samhain

Happy Imbolc!

One of the pleasures of living is to learn something new about something a whole lot of people have known about practically forever. Imbolc and the Irish, for example.

The Irish celebrate Imbolc today (February 1). So much so that it has been declared a bona fide national holiday. And I’d barely ever heard of it.

Except for a regular email nod in honor of this and other annual Celtic occasions from a dear cousin who knows well about such things.

Imbolc – I’ve only recently learned – is an ancient festival celebrating the change of season from winter to spring. Or more accurately, it is the halfway mark between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.

Which is a good thing to clarify as that change of season malarkey would not go down at all well with our neighbors who are still in the vise of winter’s frigid grip up North today.

It is a day that nudges us to connect more deeply with nature, as well as to embrace the old Celtic and Christian traditions in Ireland.

Imbolc is also one of four cross quarter day festivals that were spread between the winter solstice, spring equinox, summer solstice and autumn equinox.

The other cross quarter days are Beltane (1 May), Lughnasadh (1 August) and Samhain (1 November) marking the beginning of the ancient Celtic New Year. (Linked in case you want to look them up, too.)

Ways to celebrate Imbolc (from https://www.letsgoireland.com/imbolc/)

  • Fire and light are commonly associated with Imbolc so one of the most traditional ways to celebrate would be to mark the occasion of Imbolc with a fire or candles. 
  • Make your own doll out of straw, rushes, oats or equivalent is a creative way to mark the traditional celebration. There are different videos and tutorials available online that can help guide you on how to do this. 
  • It is also possible to create a small altar for Brigid with candles, perhaps a bowl of milk or some woolen items to symbolize the connection with sheep. 
  • Bake the traditional bread of Bannock, which was baked over the hearth and commonly eaten on the eve of Imbolc may be another appropriate way for you to mark the occasion. 
  • If you want to continue being creative, then you could also attempt to make a Saint Brigid’s Cross and hang it in your home. Instructions on how to make one of these traditional crosses are available here along with some other traditions. 
  • Both the Goddess Brigid and Saint Brigid have strong associations with healing, especially with water. A visit to a holy well or any available stream or river may be a suitable way for you to mark this occasion and be part of your own purifying ritual. 
  • If you happen to be on the island of Ireland around Imbolc, why not take part in one of the Imbolc events there such as the Biddy’s Day Festival or the Imbolc International Music Festival? Other festivities are held at other locations outside of Ireland as well, such as the Imbolc Festival at Marsden in West Yorkshire in England too. From: https://www.letsgoireland.com/imbolc/

Imbolc – like any national holiday worth its salt – also comes with an array of blessings. Handy any time of the year but especially lovely and hopeful on this day celebrating the crossroad between winter and spring.

There are many goodwill blessings for Imbolc as it is a time of joy, rebirth, reawakening and purifying. Here are a few examples:

May flowers always line your path and sunshine light your day,
May songbirds serenade you every step along the way,
May a rainbow run beside you in a sky that’s always blue, 
And may happiness fill your heart each day your whole life through.

May the blessings of light be on you,
Light without and light within,
May the blessed sunlight shine on you till it glows like a great peat fire.

And this homage to the only Irish female saint, Brigid.

St Brigid’s Blessing 

May Brigid bless this house wherein you dwell
Bless every fireside every wall and door
Bless every heart that beats beneath its roof 
Bless every hand that toils to bring it joy
Bless every foot that walks its portals through
May Brigid bless the house that shelters you

More Irish blessings can be found here. 

There is so much to read and learn about Imbolc. So much that I couldn’t possibly do a deep dive here. But I will explore on my own and will likely also look more closely at those other cross quarter celebrations.

I quite like the meaning and traditions behind Imbolc as I understand them. Could be the start of my own annual rituals and tradition.

My Irish-born great-granny Mary Shannon would be pleased.

Facing Forward

Today the curator of the Ultimate Blog Challenge on Facebook asks us to plan the 90 days after the challenge ends on October 31st. Halloween for those of you who have been sleeping under a rock.

God knows I’ve tried to ignore the incessant commercial come-ons. How many Kit Kat bars and Reese’s Pieces can one person eat anyway?

This will be the third monthlong Ultimate Blog Challenge I’ve finished this year. Ninety days ahead takes us through November, December until the last day of January. Oy, do I have plans.

November 1st is always a new year’s day of sorts for me. It is loosely associated with All Hallows Eve or Hallowe’en. According to pagan Celtic traditions, it is said that on this day the spirits of the dead are most clearly present on planet Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain

It also marks the time of harvest and beginning of the “dark part of the year.” The only harvest I participate in is doing my part in filling up the sacks of local trick and treaters.

As my spiritual “New Year,” I do have some modest resolutions for the next ninety days.

Stay healthy. That’s always Number One and always will be. I am a devotee of the “health equals wealth” philosophy. Without health, wealth don’t mean much except applying it to attempts to restore it.

Develop a debt management plan. This is also a perpetual theme in my life. I would love to be one of those people sitting on bags of money. I’m not. I’m a very low profile, ordinary financial citizen. So I manage debt.

Survive the holidays. There is a swack of them coming up in the next ninety days. If you go by the dictates of advertisers, you could go broke tricking out and tearing down and retricking out your house for the tsunami of “blessed events” coming up.

My strategy is to do as little as humanly possible for each of these events: Halloween (in a couple of days); Thanksgiving; Christmas celebrations (which is essentially the whole month of December); New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. And all of January for recovery.

If the marketing strategy is to keep us on our toes by distracting us with one holiday after another that we are expected to execute “perfectly,” it is rather brilliant.

And if we don’t have the spirit or means to pursue holiday perfection, no matter. A whole lot of compensatory products are available out there to make us feel better about not “being perfect.”

If we are single and don’t have an existing or created family to go to all the trouble for, so much the better.

And, of course, I plan to keep writing. This blog has surprised me. Over 225 days in a row so far. The biggest surprise has been that I’ve managed to keep doing it every day and plan to continue. It centers me and reinforces my own views about the world and what’s happening in it. I wish I were more unfailingly optimistic about what I see.

By January 31, 2024, I expect to be six weeks away from the goal I set up on March 14th, 2024 of writing a daily blog post for a full year. I set out thinking I would have a book manuscript by then. That seems unlikely.

There have been an inordinate amount of distractions this year. Challenges I didn’t expect. Challenges I took on that cost me more emotionally and financially than originally anticipated.

External demands that ranged from irritating to overwhelming. I was never quite sure starting out which way a challenge was going to turn out. Life is surprising that way.

In spite of the roller coaster I’ve been on this past year, I am happy to report that marketing soaked holiday celebrations have not been among them. And won’t be, dieu merci.