Today, I am thinking about holidays I love. I adore observing and celebrating holidays, you’ll not be surprised to hear. Birthdays. Religious holidays. Various new years’ observances. The death days of my Beloved Dead. The founding of Stone Circle Wicca. Anniversaries of love and loss.

I considered writing about one of them, to give a taste of how my observances go, but which one should it be? Public? Personal? Religious? Civic? Simple? Problematic? And so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts (so meta) about what I thought I might write about.

Should it be the years of Midwintertide, with the years of my youth when I went to Mass five times between Christmas Eve at 7:30 and Christmas Day at 1:00, playing the organ and handbells, singing and directing choirs? With its twenty-some-odd years of exploring the slanting light and embracing dark with candles and twinkly lights and cookie making in a dim kitchen? With eleven years of my retreat, Going into the Dark? With the winter solstice service and Christmas preaching I did at First Unitarian Portland or the “Silent Night” candles of All Souls? With the last several years of the King’s College choir and community singing and reading Lessons and Carols while Jack Mandeville and I have a “listen party”?

I like thinking of Midwinter for all its spiraling religious echoes, reverberations in the caverns of my heart. Christianity. Wicca. Unitarian Universalism. The close and holy darkness that axial tilt brings. That axial tilt is part of what reminds us that we need one another to survive. Whatever our religious tradition(s), in temperate climates in the Northern Hemisphere, we spend December invited to come together around the warmth we create. We build hope out of the stories we tell and the small lights we kindle that mirror the light “that never dies away.”

But then I thought that maybe I should explore a less well-known holiday on the Wheel of the Year. Imbolc perhaps, the fire in the belly and the season of lambs? Or its summer-fall counterpart, Lammas? Or its twin, Lughnasadh, celebrated the same day as Lammas?

For many years at Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary, the community celebrated Lammas, a word that comes from “loaf-mass,” with the breaking of bread and reflections on sacrifice. We told the Lammas story from the perspective of some Wiccan traditions: the God Who sacrifices himself for the people and the land. His Lover, the Goddess, reaches out with Her reaping Sickle, tears in Her eyes, mourning even before He dies. The God’s life, appointed from the beginning for the good of the people.

One year in particular stands out in my mind: the priest embodying the Dying God brought around a basket of bread baked in the shape of his body. Every participant tore a piece and ate it, recognizing ourselves in the people for whom He died, as well as the reaping Lover Goddess, the God himself, and the fact of his sacrifice.

Another year, we performed the story like a nativity play, complete with women leaving “bloody” handprints on the chests of male partners.

Occasionally, we celebrated the holiday that falls at the same time, August 1/2, called Lughnasadh. Lughnasadh is also about the appointment of a life, also about a god, but this time, we celebrate Lugh the polymath. The carpenter who wins the race. The bard who surveys the land. So maybe these twinned holidays would have been worth going more deeply here.

Perhaps, on the level of a single life lived in community, might it be worth mentioning my birthday’s traditional hometown weather, wintry mix? I could ruminate on my enduring passion for birthdays, my own and other people’s. And relatedly, for death days. (I suppose you can take the girl out of Catholicism, but you need a religious crowbar to take the Catholicism out of the girl. Little known fact: saints’ feast days are often celebrated on what is understood to be the day of their death.)

Or maybe celebrations of the new year: January, late February/early March, late August/early September, late October, mid-December?

What about you? Your name day? The anniversary of your coming out? The day you were married? Or divorced! Holidays are endless.

What holidays stand out in your mind? How do the rolling Wheel and its echoes of spiraling time bring to mind different years, different seasons of your life? When you think of how you celebrated or didn’t celebrate the Midwinter holidays as a child, what threads are still there in the fabric of your memory? What threads were cut or tied off? What did your birthday mean to you when you were ten? What do the passing years say to you now as your birthdays come and go?

There is too much here. Too much to think about in one letter. Too much to take in on one reading. Nevertheless, all these words give you a taste of why I am creating Turning the Wheel of the Year for us to travel along together. I long to help others have the grounding and centering experience that aligning ourselves to the seasons brings. Learning about the eight holidays of the Wheel is helpful precisely because those days mark turning points in the temperate year, the ending-beginnings and height of seasons.

It’s more than just learning, lecture, discussion, and thinking. It’s also the transformative power of shared ceremony, a communal expression of myth and symbol, feelings and intuition, art, poetry, and song, reaching deeper places than our left-brain seeking leads us. It is all this shared with a steady group who get to know one another over time by sharing the cycles of the turning Wheel, the Sun, Moon, Stars, and Earth.

And we, children of that Earth and Starry Heaven, see ourselves reflected there in the celestial bodies and the dirt below our feet. By looking up, we look within. By grounding to the Earth, we reach more steadily into the sky.

I’d love to have you with us. If you have questions or would like to know more, go to the Turning the Wheel of the Year page or simply reply to this email. I love hearing from you!

Blessings always,

Qira