Holidays and Celebrations

I was telling Nick that when we have kids we’re going to go on a camping trip every easter and I’ll collect old birds nests and plant them in the areas where the rabbits live (my kids will obviously know what rabbit turds and browse looks like) and then I’ll hide easter eggs in the “bunny nests” and they’ll have to crawl through the brambles to find them. Those kids are going to be so confused!

Ideas for rewilding existing holidays (not so hard since they’re all pagan) and any non-traditional wild holidays you celebrate?

I’m thinking about doing the feast of St. Nicholas, mainly because that’s my boyfriends name, but also because it seems close to the mark, if a little too agricultural:

-There is no doubt that the favorite saint of the russian peasant was Nicholas.
-Nicholas has two feast days each year: December 6 and May 9…beer was brewed and a few reports indicated that at such a feast it was considered shameful not to get drunk.
-The spring Nicholas marked the beginning of the night pasturing of horses in many areas. The young people designated to watch them often celebrated with a bonfire, special meal, and circle dancing on the meadow.
-parton of livestock, especially horses; he was also protector of the grainbearing fields, and according to some commentators,stood in special relationship to the earth…
-Nicholas was considered a potent power against evil spirits, and peasants invoked his name in innumerable healing charms. He was also the patron of merchants, fisherman, and seafarers, and in this capacity was known as “Nicholas the Wet” or “Nicholas of the Sea”.

from Russian Folk Belief by Linda J. Ivanits

i can definitely attest to the shamefulness of not getting drunk–at least among modern russians. i was obliged to get hammered on meteorologist day when i lived over there.

i wish i knew more about the old russian gods. they seem to be quite the wild bunch. most of what i know i learned from translating faery tales in my classwork in kazakhstan. the witch Baba Yaga features in so many stories. as does Koshei Bessmertny (which my friend luke brilliantly translated as Old Deathless Bones). though their pantheon is far richer than the surviving embers in faery tales, you can still see a lot of the ritual–like when the snowgirl (snegurochka) jumps over the fire.

stravinsky’s rite of spring comes to mind:

"...the wise elders are seated in a circle and are observing the dance before death of the girl whom they are offering as a sacrifice to the god of Spring in order to gain his benevolence,"

My family (the adults, spouses, and extended relations) consist of Baha’is, Pagans, Native American spirituality, and more or less nothing much. We have all selected a day to gather as a family and offer gifts and have a feast together - the first day of spring, March 21. It was chosen because for the Baha’is, it is Naw Ruz, the first day of the year, for the Pagans it is Ostara, the celebration of the spring equinox, for the Native Americans, it is the first day of spring, and for the rest - it doesn’t matter much, lol.

We pull out all the stops for a major feast and the presents are just amazing. This year, two of the families chose stained glass work as their medium - accidentally, neither knew the other was doing so. The theme of presents is either books or handmade - none of this commercial crap. So, my son made for me a stained glass elk that is simply exquisite, and my daughter made a stained glass pyramid out of colored glass, that opens up. Inside is a four directions circle with feathers, etched into the glass.

None of us celebrate Christmas or the Gregorian new year. We do birthdays and our spring gathering. Just with birthdays it’s getting to be overwhelming - they just keep on making new babies, lol. There are now 18 of us.

Snowflower

Snowflower- That sounds like fun! I would love to get more nice handmade gifts instead of commercial junk that i give to Goodwill (or if it’s small stick in geocaches) right away.

WildeRix-Yeah, I took both IndoEuropean Folktales and Russian Fairy Tales at college. So what you are saying sounds very familiar.

One of my friends at college started a tradition of couch burning. I’m not sure why couches, probably because they are very inconvenient to carry cross-country, and because we all liked to “push hard” (be extreme).

At the far end of our college’s cross country track, there was a nice, high bluff that overlooked the Ouachita river. Not too many people knew of the bluff, so it was a great place for our crowd to get away from the collegiate bothers and pretend to be wild.

We would gather together at the main friend’s dorm and carry the couch to the bluff. It was quite a trip. We had to maneuver down a windy slope to get to a rickety old bridge that was an artifact from the days when we had an ROTC at the school. Crossing a rail-less footbridge with a couch was quite a challenge. The whole of the cross-country track and soccer fields was about half a mile.

Then came the hard part. Up a steep, wooded embankment full of poison ivy and hercules clubs. The embankment was difficult enough to climb without an burden, but with a couch, it was torture. Then we crossed woods at the bluff top to get to the open spot where we burned the couch.

Even though we must have been releasing viciously toxic fumes into the air (which we ended up breathing), we always somehow felt closer to nature and to our primal selves from the act. Once the couch was in flames, we also had fun jumping over the couch, through the flames (ala the russian faery tales).

Speaking of old Russian gods, Boorkhan, the god of lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world, singlehandedly destroyed my tourbus. According to our guide. Don’t eff with Boorkhan!

Did Boorkhan at least give you some Baikal soda in exchange for destroying your tourbus? I always wanted to try some of that stuff, but they didn’t have it in Kazakhstan when I was there.

No, I never partook of the Baikal soda. I did have every brand of Vodka available at the time - Russkaya, Stolichnaya, and Pshichnaya. And their weird beer. And the wine served in the same bottle.

Apparently I did a lot of drinking over there.