I woke up this morning and knelt up in bed to look out of the window, and it had snowed. The garden lookied amazing, that fantastic cleaness that you get when everything is just about covered and its slightly too early for the cats to be padding through and the birds don’t want to get their feet frozen yet and the human beings are on their second or third cup of tea ‘no I’ll just have one more cup before I go out…’. I love the garden when it snows.
I was terribly excited anyway that maybe we were going to get a white Christmas and all the rest of it, but then the weather forecast said that it would rain, ah well I don’t really care I got a White Yule. So the year ends tonight…or does it begin? The year has been ending for a while since we passed Samhain, I don’t think that it totally ended then though, so does it end tonight and begin again at the festival of Bride? Or does it never truly end but only go on turning through it’s wheel? I’m not so certain that that fits either. It snowed for a fight of Kings, to show the holly to turn inwards and the oak to turn out.
My Favourite Uncle moaned on a webpage about us ‘silly Wiccans’ celebrating the victory of summer over winter tonight, in the heart of winter. But I can see the point of that. You got to remind yourself when the year has just died that something else comes, that the light is returning, that ok it hasn’t returned just now, the babe needs suckleing before Bride will come and greet us with her candles in the Spring. So I guess that the year began to die away at Samhain, or possibly Lammas and now it lies dormant in the ground waiting for a goddess to finish suckleing her child and reawaken it.
The shortest day of the year, the solstice and it snowed, it was a clean day even when the cats ventured out to leave the tracks and the birds pecked through the ice on the pond, even when my dad in his huge wellington boots made marks up to the vegetable patches, it was a clean and bright day and I loved every minute of it.