Samhain dinner, dorm edition
Planning a tiny Samhain dinner with my roommates next weekend. Nobody else is a witch, but everybody misses somebody, so it works.
The plan: one empty chair at the table, a photo of each of our grandparents on the windowsill, LED tealights (approved by the RA, in writing, I have the email), and my grandma's pumpkin bread, which I have failed to make correctly three times so far.
We'll go around and each share one story about the person in our photo. That's the whole ritual. I think it's enough.
Setting the ancestor table a week early
Samhain is a week out and I've already started the ancestor altar, because if I wait I'll be doing it at 11pm on the 31st with a flashlight again.
This year: Nan's reading glasses, a tin of the butterscotch she always kept in her coat pocket, my uncle's terrible fishing hat, and a photo of a friend from my old coven who crossed in spring. One white candle in a deep glass holder on a ceramic plate, well away from the curtains (lesson learned in 2011).
For the night itself I'm planning a dumb supper: one empty chair, that plate served first, and the whole meal eaten in silence. If you've never done one, it's stranger and gentler than it sounds.
Scrying season
This is the time of year I get out the black mirror. It's an old picture frame with the glass painted black on the back, nothing fancy, made during my first year in coven.
One candle behind me, never in front (you want the glass dark, not reflecting a flame), the cat banished to the bedroom, and twenty minutes of soft-focused looking. Most nights: nothing but my own tired face. Some nights the glass clouds over like breath on a window, and images come the way dream images do.
Last night it was a staircase going down and a hand holding a lantern. I'm not interpreting it yet. It's written in the book, and I'll sit with it until the sabbat.
Practical note: candle on a heatproof plate, well away from curtains and cat tails. The veil is thin this time of year. So are old curtains.
A turnip lantern, the old way
Before pumpkins took over, Irish children carved turnips for Samhain. Big knobbly swedes, hollowed out with a spoon and a great deal of muttering, a face cut in to frighten off anything wandering the roads that night.
So this year I did it the old way. It took ninety minutes, two blisters and most of my patience. The result looks like a potato that has seen things. I adore him.
He's on the stone step by the front door with a tealight in a little jar, nothing near him that can catch, and I'll blow him out before bed. The barmbrack is cooling in the kitchen with a ring baked in, so someone in this house is getting engaged this year, or at least a fright at the dentist.
One stone every sabbat, twenty-two years
When I was initiated, my High Priestess gave me one piece of advice I've actually kept: at every sabbat, wherever you are, pick up a stone. Not a special one. Whatever's at your feet.
Twenty-two years later it's a big glass jar on my altar, mostly hidden by cat hair. Gravel from a festival car park. A slate chip from Wales. A crumb of concrete from the hospital car park, the Samhain I spent in a waiting room. A perfect white pebble from the beach, the year my mother died.
Samhain is a week away. I'll add one more, and before that I'll tip the whole jar out on the kitchen table and remember every single one. It's my book of shadows, in stone.
A prayer for the darkening half
Wrote this for my altar as the nights draw in. Sharing in case it's useful to anyone heading toward Samhain:
Old Mother of the turning year,
keeper of the seed beneath the frost,
I give you what is finished.
Hold it while it rests.
Teach me to be quiet in the dark
and to trust the slow return of light.
Blessed be.
Blackberry cordial before the púca gets them
In Ireland you're told never to pick blackberries after Samhain, because the púca goes round and spits on every last one. My gran put it a little more rudely than that. So the last weekend in September is cordial weekend in this house.
Two big bowls of berries from the ditch at the end of the road (above dog height, always), a splash of water, simmered soft and mashed with a wooden spoon. Strained overnight through muslin, then sugar and the juice of a lemon, brought to the boil and bottled. A dash in sparkling water by the fire in January is a whole summer, saved.
The first glass gets poured out under the hawthorn for the good people. Best to stay on their side.