Festival to revive seaweed doll tradition, Co Waterford

A festival in County Waterford is reviving an old tradition of making a seaweed doll to mark the end of the tourist season on St Michael's Day:

The weed doll had a few names — Michil, others called it Breedeen and a small few called it Father Neptune. After the parading of the town, the doll was taken down to the sea where it was cast out as an offering to the sea, a simple ceremony which drew the curtain on the bathing season in the town.

"It was said if the doll turns up in the Back Strand it would mean the next season would be a very good summer."

Read more: Irish Examiner

 There's a little more detail on the history of it in another article here.

I'm just working on some research for Là Fhèill Mìcheil (which falls around the autumn equinox), and this happened to pop up on an email list I'm on. I thought I'd share seeing as it piqued my interest.

And again...

I've finally had an afternoon to myself to get on with some serious writing (and laundry, a bit of tidying up here and there...and I should probably vacuum before the dust bunnies group together and form and uprising...but I digress), and I've finally got the next article I've had on the brain finished. I've got a lot I still want to do, and probably better things to be getting on with, but if I want to actually manage to write anything at all then I have to go with the flow...

But enough blether! The next article I've done is on Midsummer - more than a little late now, but ah well. Hopefully I'll get round to the last one, on Michaelmas, in a more timely fashion. Because the festival section was getting more than a little unwieldy I've split it in two, separating the articles on the festivals themselves, and the articles on how to go about celebrating things etc. The latter can now be found in the 'Celebrations' section, right below the 'Festivals' section.That's about as workable as I can get things just now, but it's getting to the point where the whole site needs some serious re-working. The problem is, I'm just not sure where to start!

Anyway, that's enough for now. The dust bunnies are giving me evils. They must be dealt with.

Pre-Lùnastal

I'm trying to be all intellectual and do some proper writing, but it's not happening right now. I've got a whole paragraph, ish, and my brain has rebelled...

Instead, I've decided that rambling on about my plans for Lùnastal is a far better option right now, because rambling I can do, in abundance. In fact, I shall blether, because blethering is what I do best. It says so on my fridge, so it must be true:

See?

But even though it's technically the right day, things aren't ready yet in the garden. I'm waiting for the blueberries to ripen, so I have something to pick and show for it this time, and maybe in a few weeks time there'll be some blackberries too. As it is, we'll probably need some sunshine for anything to hurry itself along, so I'm aiming to celebrate around the Old Style date.

Since I've been doing murals for the kitchen these past few years, with the kids, I'm attempting to think of something to do there. Last year we did a collage of autumn leaves that the kids painted, decorated and glued into place with me just helping to cut them out:

But this year I'm trying to branch out from foliage. I'm kind of failing miserably, because all I can think of is a tree having its leaves blown off in the inevitable autumnal gales that are to follow this season, if the previous years are anything to go by. And aside from letting the kids glue things down, I'm not really sure what I can do that allows them to participate more, that retains the desired theme, as it were. It's kind of pointless otherwise. Hopefully inspiration will follow. I'm trying to think of something first fruits-ish.

Otherwise, we'll be doing the now usual; games, feasting, offerings, and so on. I'm toying with the idea of making some sort of corn dolly, but I'd rather do that using whatever I harvest from the garden around this time, and nothing seems to be presenting itself as handy. I'm not averse to procuring the materials by other means, but I'd rather have the medium be more relevant to what I've been doing in my garden already, if that makes sense. Plus, I have to actually figure out how to make it...

Butter, cheese, bannocks and butter brughtins will (likely) be made, and I intend to freeze the remainder of the carrot and coriander soup I made from my first carrot harvest so I can have some for the day as well - I'm going in the wrong order there, really, since they're more for the autumn equinox, but ah well. I'm hoping the second batch will be ready for that. Chances are slim, though, I think, they'll more likely be ready for Samhainn. My raspberries haven't done too well this year, in the end, but hopefully with the blueberries at the least, I'll be able to make some cranachan.

For the butter brughtins (Gàidhlig, brochan - porridge or gruel), it seems to be a sort of stodgy pottage, consisting of oatcakes crumbled and then cooked in liberal amounts of butter. McNeill records this as a traditional Lammas dish for shephards, similar to skirlie, which is a sort of stuffing made of oatmeal and onion fried in suet to a good stodge. 

Aside from the usual - saining, charms, devotions and a walk to the promontory overlooking the Clyde where I left offerings the previous years I've been here, that's about it for now.

Update

Following on from the recent ritual article over on Gaol Naofa, I decided to have another go at an article I started a while ago and kind of got distracted with and left for a bit. This one is on (De)constructing Reconstructionist Ritual, and aims to explore the different elements that can make up formal ritual in a Gaelic Polytheist context. It's not so much a how-to guide as it is an idea of what you can incorporate into your own rituals.

I haven't had much time for writing recently, but I do have a few bits and pieces I want to work on when I can...

Cthulhu carrots

I for one welcome our new carroty overlords...



A couple of the carrots started to flower - which I wasn't expecting because I was under the impression that they didn't do that until the second year - but I figured it was time to pull them, and this is what I got. Using the power of Google, and then my sister imparting the sum total of her knowledge of carrot-growing ("You've got to pull them in the evening!"), I made sure to do just that to avoid attracting carrot fly. And promptly got attacked by the wee midgie feckers instead. Bastards. But no pain, no gain, I guess. I got a modest crop in the end:



Only a few got munched on by something, which caused them to split right down the side. Most of them are impressively mutoid due to my own fault - being too shy to thin them out in case I killed them (because the kids helped sow the seeds I didn't always manage to make sure there was only one seed per pot). And I suspect I didn't water them enough during the drought last month - it was very hot and dry, and even watering them twice a day wasn't enough, it seems. You can see where they've had a last minute growth spurt once the incessant rain started again this month. The corkscrews, like this:



...I would guess are the result of being grown in the bags and just running out of room. They're tasty either way, but having shown Rosie my proud efforts, she flinched and ran off, commenting, "I don't like them, mummy, they're scary!" Tom, on the other hand, decided, "They're all quite funny! ...Hey, this one looks like an octopus!"

I have a batch of seedlings to put in today, in the hopes of getting another crop out of the growing season. And this time I've thinned them out.

Having bonded with my neighbour a bit over our respective vegetable gardening, I put in some radishes at the last minute after Jim told me they were quick and easy to grow. He wasn't wrong:



I bought two packets, one which said they'd be ready in a month, and the other, which was a 'novelty selection' of radishes of varying colours, that said they'd be ready in two to three months. So I figured if I put them in at the same time, I could stagger the crops slightly. But no, they've all come out at the same time after about two months of growing, I think. They're probably a little overripe - they're not a crunchyas the ones you buy in the supermarket, anyway, so I'll need to keep an eye on the next batch and pick them a bit sooner. These ones were kind of abandoned to the rain.

So, so far, success! I think the beetroots and then the onions will be next.