This is some kind of header. (none of this is in allcaps, btw!)
Wintertide
The last weekend in November
Fencraft as I do it is pro-Christmas; it is, both spiritually and secular, part of the strange heritage of our land, and so it's part of my year. As some Christians will complain - the season just isn't about Christ any more, and I agree, and I love it. The Christmas lights, the television programming, the twinkling of tinsel. And so this mini-fest, occuring over the most convenient weekend at the crossover of November and December, is part practical, part gate-opener, for this lovely time of the year.
It incorporates two traditional festival days. Stir Up Sunday is, in Anglicanism, the last Sunday before advent - associated with the stirring of the Christmas Pudding; and Advent Sunday, which is the first of the advent season. There's something important and practical about this festival; setting aside planning time for what is, for most people, a busy season, as well as making a gentle sort of commitment. Here I am, noticing and calling out into the dark.
Mythos
Quis est iste qui venit?
The Winter King is a contradictory figure. He appears as the festive King-in-the-Holly, our fantasies for this time of year, something of Santa and the secular - of just loving candles and tinsel and the Coca Cola advert. He is also the Sun King's shadow-and-brother, a figure in his own right who embodies hardship, endurance, survival and resiliance. He is also within a mythic cycle, where he is slowly hollowed out and devoured into the husk of the year that must die. And his tide-of-the-year is accompanied by other spirits - of the hidden dark - with whom he is barely compatible.
The secondary figure for this sequence is the Lightbringer, who is not yet born - but whom we can begin imagining and calling into being. The Lightbringer - some kind of Lucifer-Earendil-Elbereth-Antinoous - the morning and the evening star - is at this time more present in the starlight, and in the moon of his sister Diana, than in the daystar. My Lightbringer mythos isn't quite fully worked out; he is not the new green of the year, but a young person who can awaken it. I suppose this feels more intuitive to me because the Winter Solstice heralds the slow return of the light but - in all seriousness - not the return of the green; in fact, winter gets rather worse from that point; and so the Wiccan model of a young God who is everything being reborn isn't quite the thing. It is good to be specific.
Because this time of year is dark, my visions of the Lightbringer are correspondingly naive; there is no need to be sophisticated or edgy, when it is this cold and everyone you know is so sad. In this time, I see him at his least "devilish", and really just as an embodiment of hope. Please let the springtime come. Please let my friends survive.
The third is the Winter Witch
To Do
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
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.