Happy Holidays from the Hedge folks!!!
I have been quite busy here at Misty Acres for the holiday season but will catch you all up on the goings on as soon as possible.
In the mean time, here is some interesting reading material to help you keep your sanity during Yuletide, Christmas and etc…
First, in the news:
Bee Sanctuary Established
Häagen-Dazs has announced that it is making a $125,000 donation to the UC Davis Department of Entomology to launch a nationwide design competition to create a one-half acre Honey Bee Haven garden at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis.
Druids mark solstice at Stonehenge
Hundreds of druids, pagans and tourists braved the gloomy weather to gather at Stonehenge on Sunday morning to celebrate the winter solstice. The mystical stones attracted a crowd of 1,900 people, with some dressed in cloaks and robes, to see sunrise at the prehistoric site in Wiltshire.
A Solstice Tribute
Sunday morning was a nasty time to be out and about in New York, with cold rain falling hard, but the predawn hours were worse. Sleet was blowing at just the right angle to find its way into tightly drawn hoods and mittens, and yet 17 people got out of bed anyway, all with the same thought:
“I shall go stand in the middle of an intersection in Brooklyn and bang on a drum.”
Edmonton City hall hosts solstice festivities
Edmonton City hall hosts solstice festivities for the first time! Hundreds gathered at city hall yesterday afternoon to celebrate the holiday season through pagan ritualistic chanting and calling to the four corners of the universe. Winter solstice celebrations are among many alternatives that replace conventional Christmas traditions for thousands of Edmontonians. “It’s a celebration of darkness, and a return of the light,” said Westwood Unitarian Church spokeswoman Sara McEwan.
And some Yule articles:
Santa’s Many Faces
Pagan celebration of Winter Solstice is a tradition with its roots in the ancient past, twining from hunter-gatherer cultures through the Old Religion of Europe, influenced by the rise of Christianity from the Middle East. A look at some of the history can help you design your personal Solstice traditions.
Yule logs
What in the world makes a log a yule log? I can remember campfires where we joked about great big logs being “the yule log” and you hear about it during the holidays, but what is it? I’ve also seen log-shaped cakes called yule logs, confusing the topic even more.
And some random but interesting articles:
Crooker of the Derwent and Malevolent Water-Weirds
In my most recent work regarding Traditional Witchcraft, The Toad Bone Treatise, I present an “occult bestiary” of types, outlining some of the many strange experiences and even stranger sentient beings one may run across when engaged in explorations of this world through different modes of perception. Those “fire-sighted” people will often discover that the “ordinary” things of this world- including the features of the landscape- reveal themselves in a non-ordinary fashion, sometimes as entities every bit as sentient and self-willed as they believe themselves to be.
Cornish Witchcraft
Cornwall, the ‘horn’ of land at the very south west of England has been described as one of the ‘last strongholds of Witchcraft’ in Britain. Indeed Cornwall is rich in Witch lore and heritage with many Witchcraft traditions, stories and legends most of which are connected to specific sites or locations in Cornwall. There are many mysterious ancient sacred sites in Cornwall – particularly in the Penwith region at the far western end of Cornwall. These include stone circles, quoits or chamber tombes, standing stones or menhirs, fogous – mysterious underground passages or chambers and holy wells. Today many of these sites retain a deep association with magic, the supernatural, divinatory and healing practices, which at some sites may have continued unchanged for centuries.
Cheers folks!
