Tag: celtic holidays

Groundhog Day 2026

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment

This is my annual updated version a holiday variously known as the feast of Saint Bridget, Imbolc, Oimelc (both Celtic words related to lambing), and Groundhog Day.  I mentioned that the first of February was the only holiday devoted to housecleaning in an email to my daughter. Aha, she said that explains the backstory for the movie Groundhog Day.  It’s like house cleaning. You clean, it gets dirty, you clean it again, it gets dirty again… A good story line for a movie! At least my repetition, unlike the movie, is only once a year.

Imbolc, Oimelc, or Groundhog Day, all anticipate spring. It is one of the lesser-known cross-quarter holidays on the Wheel of the Year. In addition to Groundhog Day, it survived as the feast of the purification of the virgin (Mary) after the birth of her son 40 days earlier. It is also the day devoted to Saint  Bridget or Brigid. Bridget is the Celtic Triune Goddess in her maiden phase, converted to a Christian saint. The corn maiden from the previous harvest is brought out in her honor as a virgin once again, ready to encounter the Sun King reborn at Yul in a mating ritual of spring.

The purification part of this holiday was known in pre-feminist times as spring house cleaning. In ancient time among the Celts, Imbolc cleaning consisted of removing the Yule greenery from the home and burning it, cleaning up fields and home, and in Ireland, burning old Bridget wheels and making new ones. By Imbolc, most of us have taken down the tree and put away the decorations from Christmas, but if you haven’t, you can use Imbolc as the excuse for delaying it till now.  After Imbolc, you are at risk of being labeled a lazy pagan if you don’t deal of the winter holiday residue.

Imbolc is approaching the end of an indoor time. It’s cold and still pretty dark, but it is the waxing period of light and warmth following the winter solstice. It represents a final stage of wintry inwardness before the crocuses and daffodils invite us to look outward again. But as I write this onjanuary31s, I am looking out at heavy snow, cancellations of all activities for three days, record low temperatures.  What will Punxsutawney Phil think when he pokes his head out in the snow I Pennsylvania this year?and Housebound, we must find our spiritual practice within that space. It is the late stage of the hibernating season as we prepare for the cycle of life to begin again.

Spiritual practice has enjoyed something of a resurgence in recent decades.  A spiritual practice is anything that is centering, mindful, focusing, and connects you to the sacred in a very inclusive sense.  Practicing patience with difficult people is a spiritual practice.  Listening attentively is a spiritual practice.  Eing mindfully is a spiritual practice. Meditation and prayer are traditional spiritual practices in many religions.  But there is also a form of spiritual practice that invests the ordinary activities of daily life with significance by the spirit in which ww carry them out.

The essence of spring housecleaning as spiritual practice blends several Christian and Buddhist ideas.  One is humility; no task is too menial that we are above it, as in Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. The second is mindfulness, to be engaged in the moment, to calm the monkey mind, to focus all our attention on the window being washed or the floor being swept. The third is letting go of attachment to possessions as an encumbrance on our spiritual life, passing them on to another use or another user. The spiritual practice of spring housecleaning can incorporate all three.

Housecleaning means two different things.  One is the emphasis on clean, as in wash windows, polish furniture, remove cobwebs, paint, scrub floors, clean woodwork, dust the books. That’s both the humble and the mindful part.  In the words of one contemporary Buddhist writer, “after enlightenment, the laundry.” The other kind of housecleaning is to declutter, simplify, recycle, let go of possessions no longer needed, like the greens from Yul in the Celtic tradition.  That’s the letting go part. 

For many years my Lenten practice, for the forty days that begin sometime after Imbolc and stretch to the floating holiday of Easter, was to wash a window every day.  Then I moved to a smaller house, which taxed my ingenuity to find forty windows.  I included car windows, TV and computer screens, mirrors.  Friends helpfully offered their windows, but I did not wish to discourage their own spiritual practice.   There is something very satisfying, very symbolic in letting the light of the returning spring shine through a clean window, but it means more when it’s my window. 

A friend described a similar cleaning ritual, only she does it all on New Year’s Day.  She takes each of her many books down one at a time off the shelf, dusts it (and the shelf), and decides whether it stays or goes.  If books are a rich and meaningful part of your life, revisiting these old friends and deciding what role they still may play in your life and which ones should be shared with others is definitely a spiritual practice.  This particular ritual embodies both humility (dusting). mindfulness (concentrated attention on the books and the memories and teachings they hold) and letting go (books to be passed on). This year, I enlisted my granddaughter and her boyfriend, both book lovers, to help me to choose which ones they wanted and cart the rest to a newly discovered (to me) used bookshop in Anderson.

So, as the daffodils and crocuses pop their leaves through the snowy ground, as the groundhog in Punxatawny ponders his forecast, we can prepare to emerge from the hibernating season by renewing the spaces we inhabit. Like the bluebirds, whose house I just recently cleaned for their new nesting season  (hey refuse to return to a dirty nest), let us be about the humble tasks of maintaining our habitats. Spring housecleaning only comes once a year!

This is my annual update of this minor holiday. Enjoy!

Please share my blogs with others who may find them interesting.  Also be sure to read my 2023 book, Passionately Moderate: Civic Virtues and Democracy. Available in paperback and Kindle editions from amazon.

First Harvest, Celtic Style

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

Got some Irish, Scottish, Welsh in your ancestry? Or maybe some of the original Brits (Celtic) in your English ancestry, or Gallic that came to he islands with the Norman conquest? Celttc culture once covered a huge part of the European continent only to be run off to Britain those annoying Romans. Some of these holidays were baptized and melded into Christianity, especially . Easter with Ostara (the spring equinox, with bonfires at dawn), as well as Sammain/Hallowe’en (All Saints’ Day), Yul and Christmas(and midnight mass).. Others live on in other customs, like Groundhog Day (Imbolc) and the fertility festival of Beltain (May Day, the maypole as a mating ritual).. Lithia, the summer solstice was celebrated with midday bonfires, a midsummer holiday that is most closely kin to July 4th in this country.

But one lonesome little Celtic holiday seems to have disappeared from memory. This sweet little holiday on the first day of August is Lammas or Lughnasad, the celebration of first Harvest. I sit at the table with my friends eating fresh corn and tomatoes from the farmers’ market just two days before the holiday. As the Druids disappeared and the Celts turned to Christianity, Lammas was celebrated by bringing the first fruits of the harvest to church for a blessing, a custom carried on in this country into colonial times. I myself have led a blessing of the vegetables service, which is must less disaster-prone than a blessing of the animals and also provided fresh vegetables to our local food bank.

So add an upbeat holiday to your calendar the first of August and celebrate the abundance of harvest and the rich taste of fresh fruits and vegetables!

Joy at Midsummer

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment

This week is the Celtic holiday of Litha, the summer solstice when the Sun God is at the height of his powers and the mother goddess is ripe with child.  The festival of first harvest is still six weeks away, because these are Northern European understandings of the seasons, and they aren’t harvesting much yet.  Here we are enjoying blackberries and blueberries, watermelon and corn.  Lammas, the first of August, is the second harvest in my part of the world, and also a time to plan for  for fall planting..

l the Celtic holidays are occasions for joy, singing and dancing and enjoying the unique gifts of each season in community.  So today, descended from lots of Celts on my mother’s side, I want to celebrate two sources of Litha joy for me: my communities, especially communities of family and close friends, and my little garden with its lantana and larkspur, blackberries and zucchini. 

My mother loved to garden. My sister developed new day lily hybrids. My brother owned a farm in Vermont where he raised cows and Christmas trees.  My grandfather had an apple orchard and various relatives had dairy farms.  I do not aspire to their breadth and depth as farmers, but my birth family nurtured a fondness for gardening.As the last surviving member of that family. I carry on their love of plants and a desire to see them
prosper, not just as a family heritage but also a source of joy and solidarity with nature.

My friends are a different source of joy, much of it in conversation interspersed with adventures, like walking on the Atlantic City Boardwalk and seeing a Broadway musical last weekend with my middle daughter, her husband and my oldest granddaughter.  Some of those conversations are deep, especially those with my oldest son-in-law and my youngest granddaughter. Others are light, funny, joyful, sad, affirming, challenging.

Reflecting on the joy of family and friends and of making, or at least abetting, the growth of plants, I find these two joys joined together in a charming poem written by retired Unitarian Universalist minister Max Coots.

A Harvest of People by Rev. Max Coots

Let us give thanks for a bounty of people:

For children who are our second planting,
and though they grow like weeds
and the wind too soon blows them away,
may they forgive us our cultivation
and remember fondly where their roots are.

     Let us give thanks:
For generous friends . . . with hearts as big as hubbards
and smiles as bright as their blossoms,
For feisty friends, as tart as apples,
For continuous friends, who, like scallions and cucumbers,
keep reminding us that we’ve had them.

     For crotchety friends, as sour as rhubarb and as indestructible,
For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants
and as elegant as a row of corn;
And the others, as plain as potatoes and as good for you,
For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels sprouts
and as amusing as Jerusalem artichokes,
And serious friends, as complex as cauliflowers
and as intricate as onions.

     For friends as unpretentious as cabbages,
As subtle as summer squash,
As persistent as parsley,
As delightful as dill,
As endless as zucchini,
And who, like parsnips,
can be counted on to see you through the winter.

     For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time
And young friends coming on as fast as radishes,
For loving friends, who wind around us
like tendrils and hold us,
despite our blights, wilts and witherings,

And, finally, for those friends now gone,
like gardens past that have been harvested,
but who fed us in their times that we might have life thereafter.
For all these, we give thanks.

     \ 

The End of Hibernation?

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

February 1st or 2nd is an ancient Celtic holiday.  Since my DNA test informed me that I am 40% Celtic (a mix of Scottish, Irish and Welsh), I have taken increased interest in the eight holidays on the Celtic Wheel of the Year.  It is divided by four earth holidays and four sky holidays, beginning with Samhain (Hallowe’en),.the Celtic New Year. It is followed by Yul at the winter solstice, Imbolc at the beginning of February, Ostara at the Spring equinox, Beltain the first of May, Litha at the summer solstice, Lughnasadh or Lammas the first of August, and Mabon at the vernal equinox.  Since the Celts were all over Europe, if your ancestry is at least partly European, you probably have at least a few drops of Celtic blood in your veins as well.

Imbolc mean’s ewe’s milk, or lambing time, as a harbinger of spring.  In ancient times it was a housecleaning day, removing all the greens (or browns!) left over from Yul and re-lighting the housefires in anticipation of spring. If you haven’t finished taking down your Christmas decorations, this is the time! It is also celebrated as Saint Brigid’s Day, an Irish saint whose previous incarnation was as the great Goddess in her maiden state (the others being the mother and the crone).

This holiday survives in an odd but appropriate way in Groundhog Day. There are lots of ways to celebrate, but I am intrigued with a holiday that celebrates housecleaning as well as the end of hibernation. Or not, depending on what Punxsutawney Phil has to say. (If you have been doing a lot of hibernating, chances are your cave needs a thorough airing out!)  We have been in a COVID-induced hibernation for almost two years now, but this Imbolc is special because we hear increasing forecasts of a steady (or rapid!) downturn in the pandemic in the next month or so.  Regardless of whether the groundhog sees his shadow, we need to prepared ourselves to re-enter a post-COVID world that has changed dramatically in these two years.

Perhaps by Ostara on (appropriately) March 20th, we can figure out what is our own new normal.  It will  definitely involve more hybrid meetings,  more working from home, and less travel. It is likely that many of us adopted habits during the pandemic that involve more solitude and found that we liked those new habits better.  Many people changed their minds about working and consumerism.  We all learned to be aware of the balance we choose between safety and risk and the implications of our choices for those with whom we come in contact. We have a new appreciation for the difference between encountering one another on Zoom and in person.  We recognize the fragility of some of our cherished institutions, especially religious and social organizations that have struggled to survive quarantining.

I am always drawn to the idea of new beginnings. I’m up for celebrating not just the turning of the calendar on January 1st but also Chinese New Year,  April Fool’s day (from the calendar change that moved the new year back to January), a new year of my life every July 1st, a new school year, Jewish and Celtic new year, and for traditional Christians, a new year that begins with Advent four weeks before Christmas.

This year I want to celebrate a new year on March 20th that will hopefully mark a change in the way we spend our days and invest our time and resources in what matters most to us. From Groundhog Day to Ostara can be a Celtic Lent in which to assess, prepare, and plan for the post-pandemic world.  How will your way of being in the world be different after Ostara? What kinds of housecleaning are needed to make that happen?