Winter and I have a love-hate relationship in this neck of the woods (where temps routinely plunge to the -30s, not counting wind chill). Still, I have my reasons for loving the season, just as much as I hate the bone-chilling freezes and the constant snow-mud tracked into the house, and the fact that with my night job, I never see daylight. Here’s some of them.

Thirteen Reasons I Love Winter

1. Freshly fallen snow, and a crisp, moonlit sky, where the trees sparkle with glittery frost and your breath freezes in the air with every exhale, where chimneys puff up smoke and the night is still and quiet and peaceful.
2. Scarves and hats and mittens - oh my! I /like/ bundling up. It’s cozy and warm and the materials are oh so toasty and soft!
3. Hot Cocoa. I don’t drink hot cocoa in the summer, or in any of the warmer days of spring or fall. So it’s really quite a winter treat. I do it the gourmet cheater’s way - I buy gourmet hot cocoa mix, and instead of adding water like the directions say, I use milk, Rich and creamy. Yum. My favorite is Stephenson’s brand.
4. Snow in general! I love to look at it, love to watch it, love to /eat/ it. I don’t even put any syrups on it - I just scoop up a bowl. of fresh snow into a bowl and eat it like ice cream.
5. Super fuzzy socks. I love love love them. You know, the big thick ones in the really soft material? Love those.
6. Advent calendar countdowns to Christmastime! Have always loved those. I have a cute little Chimney with a Santa figurine. Each day, you pull a ‘brick’ out of the chimney, and he slowly slides down, and on the last day falls to the bottom to spread his joy!
7. Christmas trees. I love my tree so much that I tend to keep up throughout most of January, if not into February. *cough*
8. Cider! Apple cider! Like hot cocoa, I only drink this during the cold days.
9. All the pretty things the big stores have lining their aisles for Christmas shopping! I love how they pack the stores to the brim, and all sorts of new products and holiday sets and odd cute things to buy are scattered about. Some people hate Christmastime for its materialism. Hell, that’s just one more reason I /love/ it.
10. Santa Claus. Face it, I love Santa. I love his reindeer. Santa, to me, is still as real as he was when I was a child. He /is/ the spirit of Christmas in my eyes. When I was a kid, my uncle used to call every December, pretending to be Santa Claus. I never caught on until much later - after all, this uncle lived far away, and I rarely saw him. There was Toyland type music playing on in the background, and he’d do the whole Ho ho ho! thing real well, and talk about Mrs. Claus, and ask us kids what we wanted for Christmas, and whether we’d been good or bad.
11. Cookies! Who doesn’t love cookies? I love to bake them and eat them and give them away. I don’t put in such effort often, though I think I should… Nevertheless, my favorite thing to do with them is put them out with milk for Santa. :)
12. The scents - Christmas scents. Candy cane peppermint, and fresh evergreen (not that I get much of that with my fakie tree), and gingerbread, cinnamon and apple cider, nutmeg and chocolate. Mmmmm.
13. Huddling up by the fire. Actually, I’ve never done this, but someday… someday I will have a fireplace to snuggle up in a cozy blanket by. I swear.

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This Thursday, I’d like to post some interesting tidbits about Samhain!

Thirteen Interesting Things About Samhain

1. Secular Halloween’s customs of costumes, tricks and treats, jack o lanterns and ghosts all stem from an ancient pagan, mostly Celtic holiday called Samhain. Samhain was considered the end of the year - the crops were virtually all harvested at this point, and winter was setting in, and it was, to them, the end of one year, and the beginning of the next. It was also strongly affiliated with the death, and was considered a time to remember the dead.
2. Samhain is pronounced in half a dozen ways, but you’ll find that most people consider SOW-en (sow as in female pig, not as in sow your seeds) to be the ‘correct’ pronunciation. However, this varies as well, as Gaelic has many dialects and influences. Scots would not pronounce it the same as the Irish, nor the Welsh, etc.
3. Samhain is not - and was never - the name of any Celtic god, contrary to popular belief. It’s derived from a Gaelic word meaning ’summer’s end’.
4. The Church attempted to Christianize the holiday by forming All Saint’s Day, to remember dead saints. It obviously never really caught on…
5. Jack o lanterns were originally carved out of gourds and were used to frighten away evil spirits. Pumpkins were not used for jack o lanterns until American colonists discovered the pumpkin! Today’s gourds wait patiently on the sidelines while their fat, orange counterparts bask in candlelit glory.
6. Samhain is not always celebrated on October 31st, or November first as ‘tradition’ stands. Some modern pagans like to use the actual cross-quarter date (the exact middle date between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice) for their Samhain festival. This year, that would be November 7th. (On an unrelated note, that’s Election day where I live… I can sense a real need for some banishing spells here… *grin* Kidding, kidding… mostly…)
7. Modern pagans often hold the Samhain as the time between times, or the thinning of the veil, as ancient pagans did. This refers to the invisible veil between this world and the spirit world - or, in some cases, this world and /all/ other worlds. When this veil thins, it is easier to ‘cross over’ so to speak, and come in contact with those on other planes - the dead.
8. It’s also considered to be a prime time for divination, because during this time, as the time between times, /time/ does not function normally - and thus, you can easily see into the past and the future with much more clarity than usual. Think of it like taking a deck of cards and shuffling them and stacking them. This is time - one card flipped over every day, whatever. During Samhain, however, it’s as if the cards were thrown up in the air and scattered about, and you can see many of them at once.
9. Apples are one traditional divination tool. Unattached ladies - try this: on Samhain Eve (Oct 31st), peel an apple in one long spiraled piece, and toss it over your shoulder. When you turn around, it should form the first initial of the name of your husband to be. ;-)
10. Leaving food out for the spirits is another important tradition. Milk and bread are always good - but so is grain, soul cakes, or just anything.
11. Many modern pagans hold Dumb Suppers on Samhain or Samhain Eve. This is a supper served entirely in silence, usually with a plate set for the dead. The supper is in silence so to revere those passed, and also, to be able to hear and feel them when they join the table.
12. Sex on Samhain Eve/ Samhain can result in reincarnations, according to lore.
13. Looking for some witchy correspondences? Here’s a list:
    Colors: orange, black, brown (and personally, I like purple)
    Herbs: acorn, oak, apple, corn, hazel, nightshade, mugwort, allspice, sage, catnip, gourds
    Offerings & Food: apples, pumpkin pie beets, turnips, hazelnuts, corn, gingerbread, pomegranates, cider, herbal tea, pork.
    Gods/Goddesses: Hecate, Anubis, Isis, Osiris, Hel, Arawn, Don, Merlin, Morrigan, Idunna, Cailliach

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How time flies… it seems only a few short weeks ago that I was counting the days until midsummer, watching the days grow longer and longer. It seems just yesterday that the sun rose at five a.m, and here it is, 7:15 in the morning, and it’s black as midnight with no sign that morning’s to come.

It’s no wonder the ancients feared the sun was disappearing into the night as winter fell. It almost feels that way to me, too, and I know the science behind it. And the darkness isn’t finished. We’re two months from Yule - two months before the sun god is born again, until the days will begin to grow longer once more.

This year has sped by like lightning, and I can’t help but miss it. As a child, every day feels long as a week, and every week like a year, and every year an eternity. As an adult, I can barely keep track of the days, let alone months, and years? Has it really ben ten months since 2006 began? It doesn’t seem possible.

I miss the sunlight more working nights. The flourescent lighting in the office aids my biological clock, but it won’t be long before I walk home as the sun peeks over the horizon, and awaken after it has set. It won’t be long before I never see it at all.

Perhaps I ought to splurge on one of those sun lamps that people use for SAD. I don’t even have flourescents in my house any longer (and boy, can I tell… it seems so dark… even with five lamps lit up in the room!), and I fear that I may need a bit of sunshine, even if it is artificial, to weather out these long nights ahead.