It Came From Outer Space…

To all those of you who celebrate the Christian tradition, Merry Christmas for today.

I hope that you’re having a great time with your families and loved ones. To all those who celebrate different things at this time of year, such as Hanukkah and Kwanzaa I hope you are also have a good time, and if you don’t celebrate anything at all, even so, may the new year bring you good times and bright blessings.

I know that some of you may be lucky enough to get new technology, as we have in the past, Wiis, PS3s, Sony Vaio notebooks (ah, how I secretly wish that could be me), but the main point of this time of year is to be able to spend fun times with those you love and those who love you, and so for everyone everywhere may that be true.

Yesterday we spent the time with family having a Yule celebration, which had begun the day before, with cookie baking and movie watching and dinner out with family.

My brother-in-law and his future wife, are pagans as well, but they celebrate a more Nordic tradition to my Celtic, so we’ve been sharing with each other different traditions and some I think I will be adopting for future events, especially the blessing of the meat tradition.

I generally give a minor thanks when cooking something, but what they did was before the “roast beast” as we call it went in the oven anyone who wished gathered around with their hands over the meat, and each of us gave a pledge of ways we were going to try and make our environment better and asked for some thing back in return. It’s sort of a give/get scenario. This is what I’m going to do for you in the hopes that you will thank me in return by allowing something to happen.

So, we each went around, my BIL pledged to be more proactive in recycling and thanked the gods for allowing them to keep their jobs in the unstable financial industry and we went around. I pledged to actually FIND our recycling bin and sort out when it was supposed to be picked up and to make a start on the garden that Kore and I have been planning, in the hopes that I would be thanked by being able to find a job.

I’m going to introduce this tradition at our next “feast” which will be on Christmas Day itself. I’m doing a roast beef, rather than ham, but it’s still an offering from the Gods, which can be an offering to the Gods as well.

Tomorrow is the solstice, and we’re doing some celebration with my husband’s family tonight and tomorrow, as they’re not going to be in the State for Christmas itself. It’s an interesting time of year for us given this also marks the year anniversary of us being in our home. We signed the papers on December 21st last year, and were officially moved in around the 23rd, so it’s a bit of a dual celebration for us.

I just want to take some time to wish everyone, peace, love, joy and happiness, and that you are all in the presence of loved ones this time of year. In the words of my grandfather, Lang may your lum reek and your cael pot boil. In other words may you always have a warm home and food for your table.

I find it interesting the different levels that people consider their pets in relation to their family. On a parenting forum that I frequent one of the members was saying that she didn’t want to use the picture that was taken of her family at Thanksgiving as the Christmas portrait because it didn’t have their pets in it, and I’ve tended not to know what to make of people who refer to their pets as their children, and call themselves “Mum” and “Dad” to the animals. We had some friends who would refer to my husband and I as their pets Aunt and Uncle and we asked them not to do that any more because it just felt strange. Perhaps because we weren’t as close to them as that, and to me it just felt odd.

I suppose it depends on your kinship with the people and their animals, really. I consider Nimue to be a companion, a familiar but yet I do not call her my daughter, and do not refer to myself as her Mom. Maybe if I didn’t have a child it would be different, I did call Tori, the cat I had two before Nimue my kitty-baby some times, and when I had Anakin I would occasionally buy him presents and wrap them under the tree around this time of year. I would send other friends dog supplies and cat treats for their various menageries also. For Nimue and the other felines in our house I have bought some wet cat food as a special treat, and some cat treats as a thank you for their guardian ship of their home, but I don’t know that I’ll do much else with it this year.

The animals have acted in a few rituals that we’ve done, and often times they’re very interested to sit on the tarot cloths or altar cloths while we’ll read tarot. The energy is very attractive for them. I know when I was living at home with my parents still I couldn’t lay out the altar in my room because Anakin would lie in the middle of it and knock everything over. As with anything learning how to successfully incorporate animals with your spell workings takes practice, patience, and compromise. I don’t look for rituals that have specific parts for our animals, but I will leave certain portions open if they’re actually active in the area while they’re going on. I don’t believe in forcing the issue, just as I’m not going to force my son to participate in anything if he doesn’t want to. It’s entirely up to him if he wants to work with the rituals. So far his participation has only been in the blowing out candles capacity.

We’ve been talking about putting protective sigils into the paintwork on the house; but finding an appropriate type of paint has been tricky. At first we thought we might put a phosphorescent on there, but then found that the glow-in-the-dark factor doesn’t last long enough to make the surcharge with it. Then we wondered about just getting a contrasting latex, or getting a metallic finish, we’re still debating on that one but leaning towards a metallic.

Then comes the issue of how exactly we’ll get the paint on. Some people advocate the use of air tools, others suggest just getting straight spray paint, where as others talk about using stencils; given it’s a personal design that we’ve come up with there aren’t going to be any stencils we’d have to make them, or just draw the designs free hand. In the mean time we need to get some more of the base house color because the amount we had to use to just do a quarter of the front of the house we’re going to need at least three more cans to finish the job.

I often have dreams which I consider to be memories of other lives, however some times dreams are just jumbles of random events, and other times I can see symbology in them. During a mess of things in a dream a few nights ago I saw two married acquaintances wrestling with a horse, and I was explaining to Kore how in the dream the horse escaped from them, she said, “Maybe the horse represents their marriage,” which is in a bit of turmoil. Then again it could just have been a strange dream like the one where I found a camel in the kitchen that my friend’s boss was riding.

I try to keep records of my dreams, but some times they “get away” from me when I wake up, no matter how clear they were when I was having them. If you practise remembering your dreams by trying to journal them every day it does help; but with having a small child in the house I don’t have as much time to journal dreams because often I have to get up right away and tend to him. Ah, well.

Does anyone else have any dreams they’d like to share?