Celebrating the season you're in
Beltane, Halloween, avoiding waste, celebrating seasons and maintaining good community vibes.
Hello friends,
I’m sitting here having lunch on Beltane/Halloween, making preparations for our annual Beltane family celebration and pondering what it means to celebrate seasonally. It’s tricky celebrating something when outside your door (literally) the neighbourhood are celebrating something exactly opposite! The pull is there for our kids to go too. Each of them has, just once, and that was enough for them to understand why we usually don’t. We’ve learned to balance things out for them by making a small effort to celebrate the season we’re in.
Halloween is lovely for communities. Hoards of kids wandering the neighbourhood and being welcomed to say hello and indulge in a little fantasy and cheekiness. But in Australia, which is relatively new to the concept of celebrating Halloween, there’s no connection to the seasonal inspiration behind the celebration. This tends to lead to embracing the commercial aspects of the celebration, and inevitably all the waste and single-use packaging it brings. You can’t easily celebrate the death of the sun, ancestors long gone, pumpkins, autumn and darkness when everything around you is green and lush, flowers and light. It’s a time for wind and rainbows, blossoms and baby birds leaving their nests… I just saw a ridiculously cute baby bunny hop past our lounge room window. You get the picture.
So, we do what’s easiest for us, and go with the flow. We bring some of the flowers indoors. We grab willow branches from the tree at the park and make flower crowns. Our youngest daughter is fixing up her faerie garden, which is a little overgrown and soggy for faeries right now. I’m about to make a honey cake - we love Tessa Kirios’ recipe from her book Apples for Jam, which has rosemary leaves and flowers and local honey. Just perfect for Beltane and for right now. We’ll have pasta for dinner, with garlic scapes and broad beans from the garden. A garden salad on the side, with nasturtiums and snow peas. And elderflower cordial to wash it down. There will be dancing! Later, we’ll have warm milk with honey and some moon macadamia chocolates, maybe have an oat milk bath with rose petals, and go to bed.
It’s a festival of making do with what’s on hand. Just as our Christmas (summer solstice) celebrations are all about berries, pavlova and what’s in the garden, and we celebrate winter solstice with much of what a traditional Christmas meal might look like. It’s cheaper and easier that way. There’s no waste, just some flowers to compost. And it just makes so much sense. We understand why our ancestors celebrated when, why and how they did. Through the years, our kids have come to associate the scents of various seasons with their celebrations, just as pine leaves might remind someone of Christmas. Last week, as I made elderflower cordial, our 16yo wandered through the house and asked “when is it Beltane?”. The two are connected for her, and elderflower will forever mean that summer is coming.
But how do we join in on the Halloween community vibes and fun? Trick-or treating in Autumn in our neighbourhood is likely to be met with much confusion! So, the simplest way we’ve found for our kids to join in and enjoy the trick-or-treaters visiting is to leave small gifts by the doorstep. We fold paper origami cups and fill them with scarlet runner ‘magic’ beans. We bundle up fresh herbs with instructions for making them into tea, to bring sweet dreams and settle tummies. Some kids appreciate them and others feel a bit miffed that there are no lollies, but we enjoy checking out their costumes and showing off our flower crowns and saying hello. Through the years, our kids have dressed up as faeries and witches. Today our 11yo is contemplating being a frog. Frogs have featured loudly in our backyard this very soggy spring week, so that feels just about perfect.
How about you? Do you celebrate Beltane? Or Halloween? How do you minimise the environmental impacts? Do you love the community vibes? What works for you?
You’ll find info and cute pictures from our previous seasonal celebrations, and Beltane, here. This week’s climate solution should hit your inbox tomorrow!
Have a gorgeous evening, whether you celebrate or not!
Lauren. xx
So lovely to read your seasonal festivals story which is so similar to mine. As a country-living single parent of a boy, I joined with like-minded friends to celebrate seasonal festivals all year round. We were supported by being part of a Steiner community for 8 years so what the outside world was up to did not impinge too much! When my son started high school however I let him follow his friends in what they were doing but judging by his now adult connection to nature, and story telling through art, I'm sure those early years were formative. Enjoy your festivities! Beltane blessings 🤗