Your Personal WotY?

[thalassa]

What does your personal religious calendar look like (or your ideal calendar)?

Is it Wiccan (as a noun or an adjective) in nature? Something based on the local seasons? Norse, Egyptian, Celtic, Greek? What holidays do you celebrate? How, and why? Are there any holidays you would like to celebrate but don't?

[faye_cat]

Re: Your Personal WotY?

I try to do the solstices and the equinoxes. I also do the Wiccan WoTY for now, but I'm closely examining each one as I do because my path is changing. I am starting to learn the Hellenic calendar to see if that fits me, and I do All Souls Day (former Christian Witch). I'd like to get into more of a seasonal calendar that makes sense to me.

[Medusa]

Re: Your Personal WotY?

Birth day and Halloween are the big two important ones.

But as an atheist I'll take any holiday America tells me to take. I ain't picky.

[MaskedOne]

Re: Your Personal WotY?

Seasons are Fall, Winter, Spring and HELL. Holidays are 10/1 (give or take) and Christmas. All the other days that people think are holidays are the days when I get stuck weathering larger than normal hordes of illiterate, ill-mannered, semi-sapients whose only purpose is to sow chaos and destruction. I think most of you call them customers.

[Hawkfeathers]

Re: Your Personal WotY?

I celebrate the Sabbats and most of the Christian and Jewish holidays. Plus some non-religious ones like May 13th is Freedom Day, the day I left my ex. May 5th is my horse's b-day and the anniv. of the first time I set foot in this house.

[anunitu]

Re: Your Personal WotY?

Like Duce,most any day I get presents or candy..or when I was working,the day off with pay..

[DragonsFriend]

Re: Your Personal WotY?

Our calendar is filled with B-days, Anniversaries, some special days for us as a couple. As far as religious events go; We celebrate the six lunar events, and the nine solar events. When a solar and lunar event lands on the same day we celebrate the lunar event with the exception of a solar eclipse. The Solar eclipse is a very special day to remember the beginning of time and birth of the Goddess and God, Ki and An.
As far as holidays go... everyday is a holiday for us.

[Stardust]

Re: Your Personal WotY?

I celebrate the solstices and equinoxes. The changing of the seasons is something I always observe and celebrate

[Jembru]

Re: Your Personal WotY?

It's First Harvest again and that can mean only one thing.. I'm 34! ^^ It's also a good time to finally get round to posting in this thread.

Before I answer the thread's question I have an additional question I'd like to ask. If you do follow the usual prescribed days, do you typically celebrate on the eve, the day itself, or both? The reason I'm asking is that I saw a few folk posting 'Happy Lammas' messages yesterday. All were using the Christian name 'Lammas' so I wondered if Lammas falls on the nearest Sunday in some places? Or if it's more usual to celebrate the Sabbat on July 31st.

Mind, I often use 'Lammas' in written form just because it's easier to spell, so it's possible that's the reason the word was being used so much. The bunting above the fireplace that my mum made me, also uses 'Lammas'. She said she couldn't be bothered to cut out so many letters!

Until this past year it had been lucky if I've celebrated at all, and when I did it was just whenever I had the time or inclination regardless of the calendar date.

When I had the benefit of a coven we would try to begin our celebration in the evening of the eve (not always possible but that was the ideal scenario). If we were lucky enough to all be free the next day we would stay up past midnight, but more often than not we'd either meet again the following evening, or on the next available day. We always considered the first of the month to be the sabbat itself (yeah, even Imbolc, despite most people lining this day up with the Christian version of the holiday, 'Candlemass').

Now that I'm solitary I can be a bit more creative so I've settled on a personalised calendar. I've decided I'll still decorate my hearth the night before each sabbat, and then do any rituals I have planned on the sabbat itself. I celebrate the solar festivals/quarter days on the day they land on astrologically, and I consider the fire festivals/cross-quarter days to be November 1st (Samhain), February 2st (Imbolc), May 1st (Beltane) and August 2nd (Lughnasadh). The reason I don't celebrate Lughnasadh until 2nd, decorating my hearth on the 1st, is that my birthday is the 2nd and I like the idea of combining both celebrations! As its opposite holiday on the wheel, Imbolc therefore gets its Christian date!

Having said all of this, this year we had a little celebration in my sister's garden yesterday, but this was also for my birthday, because I'm working tonight!

[DanieMarie]

Re: Your Personal WotY?

More or less based on solstices and equinoxes, and spattered with secular holidays (even stuff like Christmas doesn't feel particularly Christian where I am....there are so few Christians in Berlin).

[kalynraye]

Re: Your Personal WotY?

So I follow the ADF calendar and my pantheon is celtic. Since Imbolc I have celebrated with a protogrove and can say I enjoy it thoroughly. We are starting the process of becoming a full grove.

[SleepingCompass]

Re: Your Personal WotY?

Just the standard wiccan holidays; when I was starting out, most of the books I read were wiccan and it has a strong infulence on my practice, though I wouldn't classify my self as wiccan. I also try and celebrate the full moons, when I remember

[Jembru]

Re: Your Personal WotY?

I can definitely see the benefit of taking your cues from nature and celebrating with the first snowdrop, or thorn blossom, or ripened cherry you see.

There's some wild wheat growing in one of the lanes leading up to the cemetery I do some of my witching in (by day and during opening hours... I'm not that kind of witch!). I've been planning to collect some at Lughnasadh since I first spotted it. It seemed a bit under ripe when I was gathering it, but when I got it home and put it on the fireplace, it's still really quite green. It could have used another 2 weeks or so.

We've had a lot of sun lately so I was a bit surprised. When I did a bit of googling, it seems that mid August is the usual time for wheat to ripen up here. As a land based witch, I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't move the sabbats to match what's happening in nature locally.

Has anyone else done this? I'm torn because I like the idea of having a fixed time when we can all celebrate, and I worry that setting my own dates would make me forget to celebrate at all.

[kalynraye]

Re: Your Personal WotY?

I too enjoy having a set time of when to celebrate. I know that nature has a way of keeping her own schedule but I recognize that the when I celebrate closely correlates with what is happening in nature.

[thalassa]

Re: Your Personal WotY?

We've had a lot of sun lately so I was a bit surprised. When I did a bit of googling, it seems that mid August is the usual time for wheat to ripen up here. As a land based witch, I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't move the sabbats to match what's happening in nature locally.

Has anyone else done this? I'm torn because I like the idea of having a fixed time when we can all celebrate, and I worry that setting my own dates would make me forget to celebrate at all.

I've been working on keeping the dates, but changing the symbolism.


We've started celebrating two sets of holidays--solar holidays (solstices and equinoxes) and seasonal holidays (cross-quarter days). The solar holidays correspond with the relationship between the Sun and the Earth as a life-cycle (Baby Sun King, Boy King, etc) and cross-quarter days as a reflection of the local bioregion...I'm still working this one out, since we just moved...