It's that time of year.

For many of the people around me, this is indeed, as the song says, the "most wonderful time of the year". Everyone celebrates some holiday or another, but I don't really see the point.

I work retail, so I have to deal with Christmas whether I want to or not. As a card carrying, Catholic-church-hating pagan, I despise the holiday. I'm aware of its roots, and that makes it worse, honestly. So much of Christmas was blatantly stolen from pagan traditions, and even though that should make it easier to brush off the taint of would-be cultural genocide, it instead becomes more offensive. This holiday, as with Easter, is a reminder of what tools were used to subjugate the ancients. I'm sure that in many ways, I take this way too seriously, but even celebrating Yule seems to have lost its meaning for me. The holidays have been corrupted for me, but ultimately, I can accept that. I'm not fond of holidays anyway, for various other reasons (Samhain is the only one that I really celebrate, other than the equinoxes and solstices), mostly because the things we're celebrating should be honored every day, and not just on that one.

Holidays are artificial to me. They feel like forcible suggestions of things that we never really forgot, and that somehow excuse ignoring that part of our world the rest of the year. We shouldn't need a day to celebrate the beginning of winter and the beginning of the world recovering from the cold, we should celebrate each step along the way. We shouldn't need a day to celebrate the harvest, we should celebrate the bounty of nature throughout the entire growth and harvest cycle. People like to talk about "the reason for the season", but the reason is all around us at all times of year, and it sure as hell isn't the birth of a charismatic man in Jerusalem. It's the cycle of nature, waxing and waning from vibrancy in the summer to its slumber in the winter.

So until a time comes when a holiday really means something, I'll just keep going through the motions as nature does the same.

12 Days 'til Samhain

My favorite time of year is just around the corner, and I for one can't wait.  Most of the people I know get excited about Christmas, regardless of whether they're Christian or not, but for me, this is the big one. Always has been, really.  At least, it has been since I grew out of the "Look at all these presents!" stage (which, probably not coincidentally, was well after I grew out of the "Catholicism isn't so bad" stage).

I was never really one to celebrate holidays, and I'm still not huge on it.  This time of year, that mindset really hits home.  Thanksgiving is up next, and I find that pointless, since we should be giving thanks every day for what we have in our lives.  Setting aside a single day to give thanks and treating that as something special just seems silly to me.  Obviously, I don't celebrate Christmas aside from how it affects friends and family members that do; in fact, I'm the only member of the family that has fully separated from that belief system so far as to abandon the religious holidays.

Samhain, however, has always held a special place in my heart.  Even as a child when I stuck with calling it Halloween, Samhain was one of my favorite times of year.  Part of it comes from my morbid sense of humor, since it's a time where skulls and bats become par for the course, but as I've explored my own spirituality, the deeper reasons have become more clear.  Samhain is a time associated with a thinning of the veil between the living and the Otherworld, brought about in part by nature's decline toward dormancy where the wilderness wanes and supplies become scarce.  It's an echo of an older time, of course, but one that still has meaning.  We may not be facing a winter where we have to sit on our personal supply stores and ration out food and drink until spring, but we still see the wax and wane of the wilderness; that ebb and flow that thins the veil is still well within our reach.

I'm not going to get into whether that veil really exists or not, or whether it thins or not, or any of those other questions here.  That's something that can be debated for days on end without reaching a definitive outcome.  The important thing is the metaphor behind the veil.  This is a time of remembrance and reflection.  This is a time to honor your ancestors and take into consideration all that has come to pass in the prior year.  This is a time of celebration of what nature has provided us.  Most of all, this is a time to meditate and prepare on the year ahead.