Happy birthday to Sam the Dog!
Sasha and Maksim decorated the front porch two weeks ago, but we didn't get pumpkins for carving, for whatever reason, until Halloween day itself. Sasha didn't want to participate, and Kala doesn't like pumpkin carving--it's a goop thing--so Aran and Mackie and I did it ourselves. We finished and set them on the porch. It was chilly day, with a stiff breeze that finished knocking the leaves off the trees.
Then I baked an apple pie for the Samhain ritual later. It came out perfectly.
After a supper of hamburgers, Mackie asked about 10,000 times when he could go trick or treat. At last I told him he could. He wanted Daddy to take him around. He was dressed as a soldier, and Aran wore a leprechaun costume, complete with pointy ears and green hat.
There was much running about, as usual, and the two houses that do the haunted front yard every year continued their tradition. Mackie freaked out at one of them--zombies in the yard!--and huddled against me whimpering until the monster pulled up his mask to reveal a perfectly ordinary human who said, "We have good candy." This was the kid who begged to do the haunted house thing with me and Sasha!
One of the neighbors dropped a packet into Aran and Mackie's bags and said, "God bless you!" Once we left her yard, I fished the packets out. Cards to a local church, bible verses, and a ceramic coaster with a cross imprinted on it. And a piece of candy. I gave back the piece of candy and pocketed the rest for disposal later.
Eventually, the boys announced they'd had enough and we headed home. There was still an enormous lot of candy left. Kala said only a few visitors had come while we were gone. The rest of the evening, we only got about eight or ten more, total. More for us!
Sasha, who'd gone out on his own, came back with about twice the amount Aran and Mackie did.
A bit later, we had the Samhain ritual. We lit the candles and ate pie and pomegranate seeds and headed outside to bring all the altar materials indoors. We put the God statues away and extinguished the flames. Darkness until Yule. Then I went outside to say a final good-bye to my grandmother.
The sun started to set. I gave Aran and Maksim a stick of incense each and took them out to the back altar for the sunset portion of the Litha ritual. It was more explanation than ritual, but you have to start somewhere.
You get a wish on Litha, which the boys liked.
By ritual's end it was getting fully dark and Mackie was getting nervous. The gathering darkness in the house was scary for him. We had lit candles all around the house, of course (no breath of air stirred inside, and it was getting very warm), but it wasn't bright enough for his tastes. Finally, Kala decided to go to bed and said Mackie could stay with her until he fell asleep.
Sasha, meanwhile, was going into serious withdrawal from the lack of electronics.
I realized that the next day was trash day, and the trash container was in the garage. The electric door opener garage. Dangit. I went out and popped the door so I could open it manually, heaved it up, and at that moment the lights came on.
Well, at least they were on.
This morning I woke up at dawn on my own, without an alarm clock. It's Litha, the Summer Solstice.
I went out to the back yard and the altar. The birds had just woken up and were singing at the tops of their tiny lungs. I entered the altar area and lit candles on the stones at each of the four directions and lit a fifth brand new one for the Solstice itself as the sun came over the horizon. I did a small ritual, blew out the candles, and walked back across the dewy grass to bed.
http://www.nbc4i.com/cmh/news/local/arti
A really good follow-up here:
http://blog.au.org/2009/05/14/justice-in-c
Maksim only asked thirty-seven or thirty-eight times when he could go trick-or-treating, even though the response was always, "Once it starts to get a little dark after supper."
At last it was time to go. Mackie insisted that I take him around (as opposed to Kala), so off we went. Aran stayed with us while Sasha went off on his own. Unfortunately, most of the houses were dark, clearly not handing out treats. Fortunately, the subdivision is fairly large and the boys have increased stamina for walking.
The weather was in the sixties, quite warm! After some time, both boys complained their masks were too hot, so they took them off. Their costumes had hoods, so they still had masks of a sort. While the boys were at one house, I put Aran's mask on and popped out from behind a car at them as they came back. "Raarrr!" Both of them freaked out, then said, "Da-ad!"
We met up with some of the neighbor kids Mackie plays with and their mother, and we merged into a larger group. We passed through an intersection that contained a patch of thick fog. It hovered like heavy ghost over just that intersection, swallowing up anyone who walked into it. It was very weird.
At another house, the residents had set up a haunted graveyard in the front yard. Strobe lights, tomb stones, glowing bones, fog machine, spooky sound effects. The local teens leaped out of darkness in bloody costumes, snarling and spitting. Mackie just about wet himself, but once we were safely past it, he couldn't stop talking about how cool it was. Yet another house had a similar haunted graveyard in the yard, and the owner had stuck a fuzzy wig on a remote control car. It whizzed unexpectedly out from under his truck at trick-or-treaters. "WHAT IS THAT?" Mackie shrieked. Aran laughed.
It's not Halloween without some serious trauma in the treats.
Then home to paw through the pile. I worked in the kitchen to assemble the Samhain foods and Kala had the boys set the candles around the house. We went outside and cleared off the outdoor altar, bringing everything from it inside, then lit the candles in the house, ate, and extinguished everything. The year ended.
- Music:Gaelic Storm
The boys found the candy baskets fairly early in the morning and thoroughly destroyed their breakfasts. But that's the way it works. Kala and I slept in, and when I got up, I offered to make pancakes, but Mackie and Sasha didn't want any. So I made them for Aran and me. (Kala rarely eats breakfast.) Naturally, about an hour later, Mackie came into the kitchen begging for food. I turned him away. "You refused breakfast, so you'll have to wait until lunch."
Next we colored eggs, the symbol of fertility and spring. While they were drying, we went downstairs and disassembled the altar. Everything was dusted and cleaned, the cloth changed from the dark winter one to the green spring one. Then it was back up to set up the outdoor altar and bring the Goddess statue out to it. We trimmed the grass and cleared out dead leaves and set up candles and other accoutrement.
That done, the boys went inside while Kala hid eggs for the Beltaine egg hunt. The boys liked that quite a lot. And then it was lunch time--grilled hot dogs, potato salad, baked beans, home-made foccacia bread, and soda. We were so full, we decided to have the pie later. It was delicious!
Joyous Beltaine!
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