A 2-Dimensional Christmas and Other Ways to Yank the Rug Out From Under the Holidaze

From melissadesa.wordpress.com

With none of my household being Christian, Christmas is an odd holiday to celebrate.  But as my daughter so aptly observed, “I like getting presents!”  Yes, tis the season!  Commerce has packaged December as the month of buying, whether you be Christian, Jewish, or African-American, or none of these.  Who wants to be left out of the present-getting?  (A lot of people, but…)  I most likely would not celebrate Christmas at all, if it were not for my daughter’s desire to eat sugar, get presents, and do fun creative stuff while cooped up in the house.  As a mystic reveler, it is my challenge to turn Christmas on its head.

Goodbye, Baby Jesus.  Hello, 2-dimensional Christmas.

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An Incomplete Halfwit’s Guide to Hosting a Feast of Fools

“There are a good many fools who call me a friend, and also a good many friends who call me a fool.”
—G. K. Chesterton

Among the scattering of winter holidays, both sacred and secular, there is nothing quite like the medieval Feast of Fools, an event once loathed by both Catholic and Protestant alike for its biting satire, ridiculous excesses and heathen trappings. This popular feast for centuries involved the occupation of a cathedral by peasants, boy bishops and livestock under the direction of a Lord of Misrule or Abbott of Unreason, usually on or about the Feast of the Circumcision (January 6). Celebrants wore costumes, cross-dressed or sported mock-clerical garb. Other features of this unusual celebration included the burning of old shoes instead of incense, gambling on the cathedral steps, and incredible inebriation. Much of the appeal of the farcical feast comes from its social and clerical inversions which ostensibly date back to the Roman Saturnalia, a week-long pageant during which slaves, at least ceremonially, ruled over their masters and everyone took a holiday. This pastime was so popular that even crazy Caligula Caesar was unable to mitigate the festivities.

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ONALISTUS REVELER IGNITES THE ALTAR OF HONOR’D DEATHS

You can start your search finding more of pics like this here.

And then “friend” us on facebook here.

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THE PLEASURE DOME & ME: Visions from the Moorish Orthodox Church

Peacock Angel camp, Flipside 2006, TX*

I was a senior in high school when I first heard of the Pleasure Dome. I had just been kicked out of J.R.O.T.C. for a series of subversive pranks, and an agreement was reached with the Drama Department that I could finish out the year there and receive full credit. My drama teacher was a Rosicrucian who was having a fling with my best friend at the time, who was a sociopath. She gave me Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” to read for a UIL competition. “I think this fits you,” she told me. I went on to give a listless reading but the poem haunted me afterward.

In the early ‘90s, I read an interview with physicist Nick Herbert in Mondo 2000 in which he suggested diverting a portion of U.S. military spending to fund a series of pleasure domes. It seemed like an inspired idea. I returned to Coleridge’s poem, finding fresh inspiration, and began to do some research, learning that the dome had actually been a large yurt, Xanadu’s Summer Palace of Kubla Khan, grandson of Genghis.

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HARVEST MOON TIME

That’s right, kiddies. It’s Harvest Moon time. And, with that brings the beginning of the Resting Tide and the downward swing of the year. Hooray!

From the New Old Hymnal of Holiday Happiness:

FALL EQUINOX: “The Birth of the Moon” (On/around September 21st)
By nightfall we will once again celebrate a birth, the birth of the Moon (ALL: Hooray!) The Sun has finally made peace with its transition and has yielded to the power of its relative. From now until the Spring Equinox the Moon will begin to regain its influence over our days and nights. Similar to the Spring Eq., the Fall Equinox is a time to celebrate equality and re-establish our connection to the seasons.

Enjoy!

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INDEPENDENCE DAY: With Beauty and Fecundity For All

What does it mean to be a patriotic American in this day and age?  If we shop at Wal-Mart, we may be under the impression it means buying red, white, and blue plastic crap—extruded petroleum from China, of course.  Newspapers suggest that being patriotic means supporting the wars du jour, rooting for the home team and providing support for “our boys over there” by forking over streams of taxed money while our infrastructure at home crumbles beneath our feet.  For many of us, the Decline of the American Empire has removed any meaning of these words.

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REMEMBERING IN TIME: Memorial Day, ritual, and thoughts in silence

As we ponder the history and meaning of our New Old Traditions, Memorial Day is upon us. Barbecues and clearance sales! Car races and a day off from school! Apparently these things that most Americans associate with Memorial Day are the reasons that prompted Congress to pass a bill in 2000 that declared 3pm on Memorial Day as an official “National Moment of Remembrance,” suggesting you take a moment from your picnicking with friends and family to be silent or ring a bell to commemorate and pay tribute to fallen soldiers.

Taking time to think about soldiers and war can certainly complicate an otherwise relaxing weekend. Thinking about soldiers means thinking about the army, and that means thinking about war, its politics, the politics of who ends up becoming a soldier, what they fought for, and who they killed before they were killed themselves. Any ceremony or speech made on behalf of fallen soldiers will inevitably touch upon some of these issues. But the issues do not obscure the simple fact of their deaths.

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PAGAN POLICE CAN TAKE OFF FOR PAGAN HOLIDAYS: Novel concept of “equality” rippling through the UK

On the heels of the recent New Jersey school system vote to allow school children to take off for pagan holidays, it appears, in at least the UK, police officers are now allowed to do the same.

The Pagan Police Association claimed yesterday that it had been recognised by the Home Office as a “diversity staff support association” — a status also enjoyed by groups representing female, black, gay, Muslim and disabled officers.

Endorsement would mean that chief constables could not refuse a pagan officer’s request to take feast days as part of his or her annual leave. The eight pagan festivals include Imbolc (the feast of lactating sheep), Lammas (the harvest festival) and the Summer Solstice (when mead drinking and naked dancing are the order of the day).

Problematically, the pagan festivals also include Samhain (known to non-pagans as Hallowe’en), a day when police leave is often cancelled because of the high incidence of vandalism, violence and antisocial behaviour.

While the “news reporting” has been surprisingly (predictably?) biased against, misinformed, and dismissive of this new injunction (here and here), we’d like to welcome the news as another indication of diversity-as-festival.

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MAY DAY HAYMARKET FESTIVAL RECAP: Springfield, IL

The organizers of the 2nd Annual Haymarket Festival in Springfield, Illinois, did so on behalf of the people of Springfield. Organizer Drew Duzinskas said, “It’s about coming together in spring. I like to see cool things happen this time of year.” His intention in participating in the planning was to put on an event that people would enjoy and take home a positive message, as well as engender a sense of community. Spring was in the air in the form of mild temperatures and intermittent rain sprinkles, but that did not quash the spirits of the dozens of people in attendance. A maypole was erected, and many folks (self included) had fun running around and around wrapping streamers around the pole, in memory of the traditional fertility rites of spring.

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MAYDAY/BELTANE 101

May Day is celebrated by different peoples for many reasons. May Day is the traditional Labor Day, or International Workers’ Day, often celebrated with demonstrations, rallies, and street marches by unions, anarchists, and socialist groups. In the United States, May Day is celebrated as a remembrance of the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886, in which a bomb went off (supposedly…) and police opened fire on a group of striking workers, killing many workers and police officers (from friendly fire). Several key labor leaders were hanged, becoming martyrs of the labor movement. President Cleveland moved the national Labor Day celebration to the first Monday in September shortly thereafter, fearing if Labor Day were celebrated on May Day, there would be further riots and violence. However, Americans are not fooled, and often celebrate the traditional Labor Day with the rest of the world. This was especially true during the Great Depression when thousands of leftist workers marched in New York’s Union Square, and in other places throughout the country.

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MAYDAY! BELTANE! MAYDAY! BELTANE!: Three images

1911 Maypole

Immigrant solidarity.

Beltane 2008: The Blue Men, The May Queen, The Green Man, The White Women warriors and the Torch Bearers pass through the Fire Arch, as the Red Men emerge from under their black cloaks in the foreground. © Peter Stubbs

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HAPPY EARTH DAY: Derrick Jensen on spiritual and ecological death urges

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MERRY IN THE EAST ON THIS EASTER OF RISING SUNS. HAIL! HAIL!

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FIVE APRIL FOOLS TO AVOID or THE GREATEST PRANKS OF ALL TIME: A short illustrated guide

1. Anything that requires writing “April Fools!” in lighter fluid.

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WHAT IS BIRTH ON THIS VERNAL EQUINOX? by Annie Reveler

Children. The decision to bring them into the world. A world. This world. Our personal avatars into the future.

Avatars, earthly incarnations of gods and goddesses. Or, virtual representations, or alter-ego.

This world, the Anthropocene Era: systems beginning to fail, great die-out of species, climactic shifts, even the seasons, the great rhythm, put in chaos.

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THE SPRING EQUINOX ACCORDING TO THE N.O.T.: A celebration of difference, new memes, and new visions

HALLMARKS OF THE SPRING EQUINOX AS REVELATED WITHIN THE N.O.T.

Birth
On the Spring Equinox the sun is born and immediately begins to influence our day-to-day activities. People start looking forward to picnics and parkside cook-outs. The thump-and-boom of dancehall auto speakers ushers in what promises to be another outdoor summer, while the unraveling of scarves allows our throats to breath once more.

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A SEASON OF VIOLENCE: A Meditation for the Coming Spring and the intensity that is the home birth

Blodeuwedd

As spring arrives, We Revelers focus on the balance between day and night. We talk of spring as a time to celebrate equality and union. We think of the peace that we will feel lying outside in the grass. We think of the flowering trees and the young tender vegetables that will soon replace our cabbage and potatoes. But, we must remember, that though the coming equinox announces the arrival of spring, we have hardly arrived in a season of peace. In fact, we’ve just reached the climax of the battle.

Those who follow These New Old Traditions know that the season of The Push has just passed. The Push is our limbo season, our cleansing tide, and our time for burrowing in. I also see it as the beginnings of our labor. It is the time we have to prepare ourselves for the birth and union that is about to come. It is easy to think during The Push (or at least to hope) that that was the hard time… when our new season of growing tide arrives with the Spring Equinox, we will have found the moment of release we’ve been craving. Too bad! The rhythms of the earth have other plans for us!

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DOING IT OURSELVES: Ritualizing our holidays

After attending a winter solstice get-together that was entirely infused with ritual and meaning, I decided to recreate this experience on the vernal (spring) equinox. Although the winter solstice gathering was enjoyed by a large group of extended friends, I am spending March 20/21 with my lover, and so we planned our intimate rituals accordingly. Large group or small, creating your own rituals gives new meaning to any holiday, especially ones whose meanings have been largely forgotten.

My dear editor reminded me:

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UPDATE: PASSED!: NEW JERSEY APPROVES SCHOOL CALENDAR MAKING WICCAN/PAGAN HOLIDAYS LEGIT

School's out for IMBOLC!!!

UPDATE: According to our favorite NJ pagan on the scene, Mrs.B, the new holiday calendar has been passed. What does this mean for school kids in NJ? Don’t want to pass on any false info, but we think it means you can be excused from school for Samhain! Boo yah! We’ve got a call in to our little contact outside the meeting. Waiting to here back. Will keep you posted.

++++++++++++++++++

NEW JERSEY VOTING RIGHT NOW ON MAKING WICCAN/PAGAN HOLIDAYS LEGIT!!!

The NJ Board of Education is currently in session.

This morning, the New Jersey Board of Education will vote to approve their list of religious holidays permitting pupil absence from school for the 2010-2011 school year.  Included for the first time on this list are the eight Pagan/Wiccan holidays, or sabbats.  If approved, this will mark the first time any state has approved Pagan holidays to a state calendar, and will set a precedence for other districts and states across the country.
—From Mrs. B Domestic Witch

We’ll keep you posted…

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HOW TO BE A LITTLE BIT IRISH: Part 2—Celebrate the important things in life

Last week I explained what not to do to celebrate a very New Old St. Patrick’s Day. Then Onalistus gave us some exciting history of the tensions between our dear saint and our dearer pagan brethren with some advice on how to honor that. But, now that March 17th is upon us, I know all Ye Revelers are just itching to get festive. You came to the right place.

A Short List of Everything You Can Do to be a Proper Almost Irish American

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