I’m a holiday nut. I like holidays. Holy Days are days people take the opportunity to celebrate things that are important to them. To remember historical events. To express appreciation for people on their birthdays or other anniversaries. Historically these were things that spiritual leaders encouraged people to get together to do, but more and more people are beginning to say, well, if this is important, isn’t that? Let’s celebrate that? As an example, since Valentines Day has become a day to celebrate romantic relationships, people are recognizing platonic relationships with “Galentine” and “Palentine”s Day”. A few hours of silliness was so memorable people started recreating it with “Talk like a Pirate Day” which engendered Talk Like: Shakespere, Yoda, William Shatner, and even “Skulk like a Ninja Day”. All in good fun.

I like finding out when New Years Day is all around the world. Different places celebrate at different times of the year. I personally relate to springtime as the new beginning, but just as some cultures begin a day with dusk (for example, Jewish holidays), if you feel the dark comes first and the light is born out of it, you are more likely to celebrate your new year in the fall ie. Samhain or Rosh Hashanah. Some calendars are Solar based, some Lunar, and some combine both, which I’m glad I don’t have to deal with. Also, seasonal holidays are going to vary around the world. Obviously December 21st is going to be the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, as it’s the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. But how far north and south you are makes a difference as well. For example: On December 13th, Santa Lucia’s Day, in Trondheim, Norway, sunrise is at 9:32 am (and sets at 2:32 pm). In Glomfjord sunrise is nearly 11, and down around 1, whereas closer to home, in Washington DC sunrise is at 7:17 am (sets 4:46 pm). That should make you appreciate why the daughters of the house when bringing their parents saffron buns and coffee for breakfast had to bring (wear) the light with them.

I spent much of my life celebrating every holiday I found that sounded good to me, and good for the family. As I’ve gotten older, I start to wonder if this falls under the category of Cultural Appropriation. I didn’t worry much about making Latkes for my friends who are Jewish witches. My Jewish friends shared their recipes with me, and now I make sure the bachelors who have no wives or mothers to cook for them still get yummy potato pancakes every year. I’d be more dubious if I were re-enacting religious rituals from cultures I’d only read about, but I think recipes I’ve found it cookbooks or on the internet are fair game. I love the spiritual intent of the holiday foods: Soul Cakes were given out by women who’s husbands, children and other relatives had died to the poor who came by on All Souls Day “Souling”. The poor sang, and promised to pray for the souls of the dead loved ones in exchange for the food the donors gave. Did they? Probably some did, some didn’t. Did those prayers help the dead loved ones get out of purgatory sooner? It doesn’t matter to me. It gave the widows something they could do for their beloved dead, the poor something of value (their prayers) to exchange for charity, and if the dead watch their loved ones, they would know that they were remembered with love. It’s all good. The souling tradition is only one of many forms of begging that was socially acceptable, and happened at all the major holidays to give the poor one way not to die of starvation, but it’s now evolved into Trick-or-Treating.

The tradition of “Mince Pies” was that you should eat 12 every year during the 12 days of Christmas, one for each month of luck. But the tradition specified that they each had to come from a different kitchen! This would encourage people to visit each other, and support community. If we adapt the tradition from Mince Pies to Cookies, the energy is the same, you are sharing with friends, neighbors, and family (kith and kin) and reinforcing community and family ties. It will work better if done with intent, as we magick users well know. In rituals we go through the motions, but it’s the intent that gives the universe a kick and says ‘make this happen’.
I first learned about this in a book describing how English women would go from house to house during WWI trading pies to send to their husbands, sons, and brothers over in the trenches. They desperately wanted their loved ones to have luck avoiding the bullets and gas etc. Not just one month, but 12 months, so they traded them to send over there. Can you imagine the internal conflict of the boys seeing these lucky tokens (they’d probably joked about the luck all their lives, but while being shot at, you don’t want to take a chance not to get all the luck you can), and wanting to live, but wanting their friends to live too. Would they share? We know they did. They shared mince pies with the Germans during the Christmas Miracle Truce. To me mince pies encompass all that, and because of the past hopes of those who made and consumed them, still now contain that blessing.

We know there is magick in food, there is magick in rituals we share. Simply singing or dancing together is most basic way of aligning energies of people in a group, so that it can be directed to a common goal. Sharing food is a sacred act that connects everyone who shares it. We know this both intellectually and at a gut level. The food can contain the energy whether love, or healing, or “gods, my life is a mess, no one appreciates the work I do, everything sucks!” And those who eat it can sometimes feel that energy, but always partake of it if they do eat it. We can do spells or raise power to do something with it, but holidays are when groups come together to reaffirm their relationships to each other and the gods or the concept that any holiday represents. They are the most basic form of holiday, going back to the earliest hominids sharing food (eat it before it goes bad, as well as let’s keep the young who are our future, and the old who hold the wisdom of the tribe alive) that they’d hunted and gathered. This may be why in neo-paganism it is the festivals that are the most obvious manifestation of our communities, even more than the more numerous smaller events done in smaller groups. My conclusion has been that similar practices arise independently from similar circumstances, and if we see someone doing something that we are already doing, but they have figured out a way to do it better, we aren’t stealing from them. Stealing is when you take something, and leave the other without it. If one fire lights many others, the first fire isn’t gone. It’s always respectful to remember and share where you got your inspiration, but I’m not going to refrain from sharing things that make my life and the lives of those around me better because it’s not totally original.
So I’ll close with some modern folk lore: “Be excellent to each other, and party on!”