Happy Spring!

I've never celebrated Spring before. I mean, I guess everyone sorta celebrates it, they acknowledge that winter is over, the days are now equal with the nights and will soon be longer. They move their clocks back. But I've never really celebrated it before.

Ember is Pagan and celebrates the seasons, and invited those that wanted to to celebrate with her. She was careful to point out that not all Pagans do the same things to celebrate, just like different Christian families have different traditions for their holidays, and so that what we did with her today wouldn't be necessarily what other Pagans did. She said that her family didn't always even do exactly the same thing year to year, and that this year we were going to do something a bit different.

She said that she doesn't do so much "woo woo magic" type stuff, that for her personally, that the scientific aspects of nature was the focus of her belief. It's a lunar holiday, and this year there was something called a "super moon", which Ember explained was when the full (in this case) or new moon happens at the same time when the moon is really close to the earth making it seem really big and low. She said the next time that happens won't be until 2016! In order to see it, we got to camp outside in the back yard, and we didn't have a bedtime! It has been warming up lately, but it was definitely pretty chilly, even with a bunch of girls stuffed into a little tent. Good thing that we had a small campfire to keep us warmer!

I woke up when Ember shifted out of the tent around 7am. I think she must've had a tiny alarm set or something because all of the other girls were out cold. I didn't get up until she left the tent though, and even then I stayed in my sleepbag and just watched, since I wasn't sure if she'd wanted to be alone. She relit the fire, and sat in front of it, writing in what looked like a journal. She tore the page out, stuck it on a stick, and put it into the fire until it had all burned up. She sat there for awhile, but I think I must've fallen back to sleep. I asked her about it later though and she said that she'd written down some things she wanted to start doing.

I woke back up again later, must've been closer to 9, when I heard the back door close, and Ember was carrying a big tray, so I rushed out to help her. She'd made us scrambled egg wraps, which is sort of like an omelette in whole wheat tortilla. Aedon and I had ham and cheese and Riley and Ember just had asparagus and mushrooms in theirs since they don't eat meat. Ember said that eggs, spring greens, and ham were all fairly traditional foods to eat for Spring celebrations. After we were done eating we packed up everything but the tent (because an adult had to break it down so that it could fit in it's case) and went back inside the house.

We made flowers from pipe cleaners and crepe and tissue paper, and little paper cones to hold them to give others, and after we had lunch, we went to a nearby park for a walk. On the walk Ember told us some of the things that her family had done in previous years, like egg hunts and egg races, but she said she thought she was a bit old for things like that. She said that one year her family stayed with another family who owned a non-working farm with a lot of land, and that they had an enormous bonfire that a bunch of people danced around, and that there was a basket of bells and other instruments, and that the children used those to make a lot of noise to "wake up the Earth". She said other years when it was too cold or snowy still for outside stuff, they had cleaning games inside. I told I was glad that she didn't make us do cleaning, even if she did make it into a game!

On the way home from the park, we picked up some stuff to plant a few things in pots, and we worked on those before dinner.