The holidays are coming...the holidays are coming...

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Above all, this is a practical kind of weekend set aside for planning. You ought to be conscienciously offline, except for essential tasks.

Planning

Upcoming festivals include Winter Solstice, the Winter King's Feast, Mother's Night, Bout l'An and a winter full of wild hunts. This is a very busy spiritual period. Things to plan include:

• Get out any "Christmas decorations" - maybe, make some
• Make a Christmas pudding (or other equivalent that needs to be made in advance), and make a wish
• Make preparations for Christmas presents, if you do this
• Look up the writeups for the five upcoming festivals, meditate if necessary, and prepare materials and equipment
• Look through the Reading List, and make plans for the season.
• Identify the full moon (for Diana) and the dark of the moon (for the Fisher)
• Prepare for the winter. This might be - bringing out winter clothes or curtains, or if you live somewhere with dangerous winters, making survival preparations and checking the house is secure.

The weekend is thus both secular and sacred, but you will not regret it given the business to come.

Rites

Take me with you, river, on your dark journey

Key themes here. The first is to create a gate, and welcome through it the festive spirits of the year - the Winter King of the Woodland and his fairy entourage. Festive decorations, a wintery walk in the wood, a gate-opening ritual and sabbat that is in its own way, a mini-Christmas day - a connecting with festivity - could all be a fit. The first of December is ideal for this.

The second is to offer prayers to the Winter King within his hall, that your own home might be protected in this time - perhaps with the making or putting up of protective signs for the season. Tightening up your wards, and so forth. In our lore, the period around Christmas is notably dangerous. Consequently, unless you have a particular focus on spirits in the dark, the main trend is to keep those things away while they are at their power. This is my personal preference is not to connect to that trend in the long dark; I think, a vague ancestral sense that my forebears would not have done so, except with respect, and because winter is just grim in Britain. It is good to remember the summer is coming. An alternative model, however, could be making plans for little offerings to the dark to politely request they leave your home in peace.

The third is to make an excuse to assemble some kind of decorated altar and light a candle on it. Who is it, that is coming? Our day-of-the-Lightbringer is the Solstice, and so our waiting and watching is for the return of the dawn (and with it, things we are building within ourselves - the reflective theme of the period being that which we leave behind in the old year)

The fourth is processions: to create a processionary urge towards that which is coming. It could be the Holly King in his sleigh, or the Lightbringer new born, or the triumph of the Winter Witch, as suits you. The Christian advent is four Sundays, and that lends itself to a theme of four parts - a devotional spread out across time.