Finding a Community

It’s been almost a year since I updated this blog! How’s everyone doing?

The Spring 2022 semester is almost over, which means I’m going to have a bit more time on my hands during the summer, so maybe that means I’ll be able to get back to blogging some more. I’ve definitely got some ideas about things to write about that have been swirling around in my head. I just haven’t had the time to sit down and write.

The topics I really want to write about are fairly unpleasant, unfortunately. Texas is further sliding into becoming a White Supremacist Christian Theocracy. This is something I’ve worried about for a long time but it’s really accelerating now. I’m saving that for future posts.

When I last updated the blog, I had enrolled my daughter in a Montessori school and I was about to go back to teaching on campus instead of remotely. Things were supposed to be getting back to normal.

That didn’t quite happen. COVID-19 wasn’t done yet. My husband ended up catching the Omicron variant from work in January and then gave it to me and our daughter. He was vaccinated but had procrastinated on getting boosted. My daughter is too young to get vaccinated. I was fully vaccinated and boosted, but caught it anyway from being stuck in a house with a sick husband and toddler filling the place up with their germs.

Fortunately for all of us it turned out like getting a bad cold. I give credit to the vaccines for that, and thankfully the common wisdom that little kids tend to get less sick from COVID than adults held true for my unvaccinated daughter.

But that’s not the good news I have to report. The good news is that the Unitarian Universalist Church that my in-laws have been members of for many years now has a CUUPS group, and I have joined it!

(Oh, that reminds me. Sadly my father-in-law passed away in October. After seeing the outpouring of support my mother-in-law got from the church, it made me even more determined to go ahead and join that church, even before I found out they had a CUUPS group in the works.)

I’ve written here before about my difficulties in finding a community, but this is looking promising for several reasons.

First, someone else is running the thing! A woman from the church got this CUUPS group all set up and official and all I had to do was join! I do plan on helping out and becoming more active in it as soon as I can, but the whole thing isn’t depending on me. If something comes up and I can’t make it, they can go on without me. This is definitely not a “if you want a pagan group, why don’t you start one yourself?” type situation where the whole thing is resting on MY shoulders. Thank the gods!

Also there seem to be at least three or four people who are committed to making this work, maybe more, so it’s not dependent on just the woman who got it started either. This is a problem I’ve encountered before with pagan groups. One person (sometimes it was me) gets it all set up and pays all the money and makes all the plans and reservations, and other people maybe show up, but if something happens to that one person that does all the work, no one else steps in and the whole thing fizzles out.

I think it helps that this is a CUUPS group affiliated with an established Unitarian Universalist Church that has been around for decades. That means we have the use of church facilities and the people who are members of the CUUPS group are also members of the church in general. These are people who know how to run an organization, who are not against actually paying money and doing some work to keep things going, who are actually interested in building something that lasts, and I mean that both metaphorically and literally. A few of the members are people who were actually involved in getting the church building built to begin with.

We’ve had one Zoom meeting so far and then a physical get together in a member’s backyard in April. Children were welcome. My 2 year old daughter was the youngest child there. The rest of the kids were pre-teens, but no one seemed to mind having a toddler there. She is a really cute kid, of course, and was very well behaved! I was quite happy with the diversity of people there. Kids, parents of those kids, single people, seniors. That’s the kind of group I want to belong to, one that has people from all walks of life. (As I’ve written about before, I got kind of cut off from the pagan community when I had a baby because there were no baby-friendly things around.) I was also afraid that I’d be the only Heathen there with a bunch of Wiccans, but I saw at least two Thor’s hammers on other people’s necks and one Valknut t-shirt. I wore my Valknut necklace.

The plan is to do some events that are just for CUUPS, and some that are hosted by CUUPS but for the whole church. We were going to do a Maypole for Beltane for the whole church, but it turns out it was a little bit of short notice to plan out something good, so instead we’re planning on doing something for Samhain/Day of the Dead and maybe we’ll add Beltane next year. We’ve got plenty of time to plan something awesome for that, and hopefully it will become an annual tradition, and we could add more events later on.

I also plan to get more involved in the UU church in general. I was going to do it sooner, but the pandemic made them go all remote and watching a church service on Zoom didn’t sound that appealing. Then they went back to face-to-face, but only for vaccinated adults, so I wouldn’t have been able to bring my daughter. Then they allowed only vaccinated children, and my kid is too young. Now finally they have their childcare open again for children under 5.

It seems to be especially important right now to find some kind of community like this, with what’s been happening in Texas lately. I’ve got to find “my people,” and by that I mean people who don’t want to live in a society where white women are the property of our husbands and our only purpose to pop out as many white babies as possible, where people of color are second-class citizens or worse, and where LGBTQ folks are ostracized as perverts. It really looks like that’s what the people in charge want, so it’s even more important to find my people because there’s safety in numbers.

The minister of this church is a black woman who does lots of work for racial justice and women’s rights. The church members I’ve met so far, besides the pagans, seem to be a mixture of atheists and agnostics and liberal Christians who left more conservative churches but still consider themselves believers in Jesus. Sounds like exactly the kind of people I need to be associating with and making alliances with during these times.

Technically I haven’t officially joined the church yet, but I let the lady who is in charge of that know I’m interested. They have some kind of initiation or something every six months or so, and I just missed the most recent one. I think she said the next one is this fall. But now that they’re meeting in person again and I can bring my daughter with me I’m going to start going regularly and hope this works out. I’m optimistic that it will.

Getting back to “normal?”

Next week will be two weeks since I got my second dose of COVID-19 vaccine, so it’s almost safe for me to show my face in public again!

This past year has been one of the hardest years of my life. Possibly THE hardest. My daughter was almost 6 months old in March of 2020 when everything shut down. My life had just felt like it was getting to some sense of “new normal” after having a baby. I was back at work, my daughter was in daycare, she was sleeping through the night.

Then the pandemic hit. All my classes went remote. The daycare I had my daughter in was one of the few in the area that didn’t shut down, but so many people pulled their kids out that she was often there with only one or two other babies. It was actually kind of nice for those last two months of that semester. I still dropped her off at daycare every day and then went back home to teach my classes on Zoom. There were so few other babies there that I wasn’t too worried about her catching COVID, or any other diseases for that matter.

Until May 1 when the governor ordered the economy open again, and suddenly the daycare was packed. We toughed it out for the last two or three weeks until I was on summer vacation. I didn’t teach any classes over the summer and was a stay-at-home mom for three months.

Then back to school in August. She was only back in daycare for a few weeks until she got sick and passed whatever it was on to me and my husband. We all got tested and it wasn’t COVID. The doctors said it was probably just one of those other viruses that frequently get spread around in daycares. But we caught it despite the daycare’s supposed enhanced safety protocols, so it could have just as easily been COVID.

Anyway, it freaked my husband out enough that he insisted we pull her out of daycare and get a nanny. Either that, or I would have to quit my job because there is no way I can look after a toddler and teach Zoom classes at the same time.

So we hired a college student to look after her for the rest of the fall semester, but after that semester she said she couldn’t anymore, so we had to hire another college student for Spring 2021. Having a nanny has probably been much safer than daycare, but it’s about four times more expensive, which means we’re paying about half of my salary just on the nanny. Nannies are also much less reliable. If she can’t make it because she’s sick or her car breaks down or her dog is sick or whatever, there’s not much I can do about it but miss work too. That’s happened more often than I expected, and really I’ve needed to work more, not less, to adapt my courses to work online when they weren’t designed to be that way. Every missed day or week because the nanny had some kind of personal issue meant me getting more and more behind. I started missing deadlines for work. Then of course there’s the distraction of trying to Zoom while everyone can hear a kid screaming in the background or trying to work silently while the kid naps. It sure was much easier to work when she was at daycare and I had a nice, quiet house all to myself!

I recently read an article written by a mom whose kid was born in February 2020, so she was still on maternity leave when the pandemic hit. She said she can’t tell if all her stress is new-baby stress or pandemic stress because it’s all blended together. I could really relate to that, even though I had my kid right before the pandemic. I still have to remind myself that probably being a parent isn’t usually this stressful. I have to tell myself, “it’s not me, it’s the pandemic,” to assure myself that it’s not that I’m not cut out to be a mom.

Now it’s summer and I finally have a little bit of a break. I feel like I’m just starting to get back out of “survival mode” and am able to take a deep breath and reflect on what I’ve experienced. That’s why I can finally write another blog post after over a year!

We have enrolled my daughter in a Montessori preschool to start in August so I won’t have to deal with nannies anymore. She’ll be almost two years old by then, and it will be the first time she’s been around other kids her age for over a year. It’s more expensive than a regular daycare, but definitely cheaper than a nanny! I’ll be teaching one face-to-face class and the rest of my classes are going to still be remote, so I’ll only be going in to work two days a week. That schedule was set a couple of months ago, and fortunately they said that now that students are starting to enroll, they won’t change any of my remote classes to face-to-face, even though the pandemic is finally starting to die down. Thank goodness, because at least that gives me some predictability. One thing I’ve learned is that teaching remotely is different enough from teaching face-to-face that it really requires a full course redesign. Which is something I haven’t had a lot of time to do.

I have a feeling that I’ll be back to 100% face-to-face for Spring 2022.

But will things be back to normal by next spring? What does that even mean anymore? I know a lot of people are asking this question now, not just me. I’m lucky that I didn’t lose anybody to COVID. My husband, who is an “essential worker” and had to keep going to work like normal this whole time managed to avoid catching COVID. I only have one friend who even got sick from it, and they made it, though they have some of those lingering symptoms you may have heard about. Then of course there’s the continuing political unrest with a frighteningly large number of my fellow Americans thinking the current president is illegitimate, and there was the severe February winter storm we had here in Texas. That could warrant a post in itself, but we survived that too!

I guess that’s about all I have to report right now. Just wanted to write something real quick to let anyone who still reads this blog know that we’ve survived the last year. My daughter is starting to stir because it’s about time for her afternoon nap to be over, so I’d better wrap this up!

Ostara is about Hope

Ostara is the goddess of hope for the future. She’s the goddess of the blooming flower, the sprouting seed, the hatching egg, and the newborn baby. She reminds us that it’s always darkest before the dawn, that every winter ends, and that for every death there is new life.

Sometimes it doesn’t always seem that way. Our ancestors knew that. Even when they abandoned the old gods for the new one, they kept the basic idea of Easter. Yesterday was Good Friday, a solemn commemoration of their god’s death, when things seemed hopeless for his followers. Tomorrow they celebrate his rebirth.

Easter or Ostara or whatever you want to call it, it’s about how we’ll get through this. We might be going through a rough time right now, but all things must pass. Just hang in there. The snow will melt, the flowers will bloom, the birds will return. We’ll never forget the hardships of winter, the setbacks we’ve had, the loved ones lost, but all is not lost, and life will continue.

What if Odin hadn’t listened to the seeress?

What if Odin told the seeress to stop being such an alarmist?

What if, when Fenris Wolf broke his chains, Odin ignored it?

What if, when the Wolf started ravaging Jotunheim, Odin said, “Well, that’s really far away. He won’t make it to Asgard.”

What if, when the Wolf made it to Vanaheim, and then to Alfheim, Odin told everyone in Asgard that it’s still not here, so we’ll be fine?

What if, when Heimdall blew his horn, Odin told Heimdall to cut it out, he’s going to cause people to panic?

What if, when the Wolf started devastating Midgard, Odin said there was no way anybody could have seen this coming?

What if, when the Wolf broke through the walls of Asgard, Odin said he’s always taken the threat of the Giant Wolf Monster seriously, and you can’t blame him for this, because he everything he could?

Allfather help us defeat this enemy

Well, that escalated quickly. But I guess that’s what viruses do. It went viral.

I’ve been a bad Heathen lately. Taking care of a baby requires a lot of time and energy and attention. I’ve been neglecting the gods and haven’t even done anything for Ostara yet, though I usually give myself a window of time between the Spring Equinox and Christian Easter (when I get a three day weekend off work) for that celebration, so I still have time. I was planning on inviting people over, and now those plans had to be cancelled for the sake of social distancing, but I’d still like to at least do a little something with my husband and daughter.

But since the pandemic really got bad, I starting giving Odin regular prayers and offerings again. Why Odin? Well, besides already having a strong relationship with him (he was my first god, after all), I think Odin has particular skills that would be very useful to us right now.

Usually when Heathens want healing they turn to Eir, and that’s a good choice. But Odin is a healer too. Second Merseburg Charm is the most well-known example in folklore of Odin’s expertise in the healing arts. And it fits with his personality. He’s a wise man and a magician and a scientist. Healing is a magical and scientific art that everyone needs at some point in their lives.

In addition, this particular disease is a respiratory infection. It kills people by literally taking their breath away, and Odin is the one who gave Ask and Embla the gift of breath. It would make sense then to call upon Odin to help fight this virus that deprives people of his gift.

This disease is also more severe in elderly people, and Odin is depicted as a wise old man. I’ve been very disturbed by some of the misleading rhetoric that suggested younger people don’t have anything to worry about. For one thing, some young, healthy people have died from it, but even if it did only kill older people, that’s still bad. My own Lieutenant Governor suggested that letting old people die might be worth it. Such rhetoric is disturbing because it suggested that elderly people are not worth protecting. I don’t thing that my pre-Christian ancestors would have agreed. I’m sure they would have seen something killing off all the elders of a tribe as being a pretty terrible thing.

Odin is also an expert at preparing for disasters. I’ve been a bit of a “prepper” since the Great Recession. I tend to buy most non-perishable food in bulk. I have a chest freezer in the utility room that I keep full of frozen meat. I have a garden and fruit trees and can and freeze any excess produce that I grow.

So far my squirrel-like tenancies to keep a hoard of food hasn’t been much more than a quirk that doesn’t really hurt, but hasn’t been really necessary either, expect for maybe this past summer when I was in my second trimester and completely filled my freezer with frozen stews and casseroles. I’ve often heard of the burst of energy women get in their second trimester that makes you start “nesting,” though most people talk about doing a thorough house-cleaning at that time. Instead, I cooked and froze and cooked and froze. And it came in VERY handy both when I had a newborn baby, and now during the pandemic we’re still eating some of that stuff (though we’re finally almost out).

What does this have to do with Odin? Well, Odin is always preparing for Ragnarok. He gathers as much intelligence as possible on when it could happen and how it could play out, and then he prepares for it. He knows it’s inevitable. He knows he can’t prevent it entirely, but he also knows that he can take actions now to at least mitigate the damage.

In early March, when I started hearing about this new virus, and how a few cases were starting to pop up in the United States, I thought it couldn’t hurt to start stocking up on supplies. What Would Odin Do? I went to Costco and got some big cases of toilet paper and canned goods and pasta and baby supplies and frozen foods. Despite President Trump insisting everything was fine, I figured it couldn’t hurt. Best case scenario, I’d end up with a lot of stuff that will take us a while to use up, but it was all stuff that we use in our household anyway. It’s not like it would go to waste.

I got all stocked up about a week before the Great Toilet Paper Panic. We’re still using toilet paper that I got back in The Before Times. Thanks Odin!

I also pray to Odin for good leadership. Odin is the chieftain of the Aesir. He knows how to lead in a crisis. I doubt he would keep insisting that everything is totally OK and you can just go about your business as normal, when it’s obvious that it’s not. Sugarcoating the problem seems like the exact opposite of what he would do. He would want us to prepare for the worse case scenario.

During this pandemic, the United States have been in a state of confusion, with leaders at different levels contradicting each other and contradicting scientists and experts. My county is under strict stay-at-home orders. The county right next to us isn’t. Is the virus worse here than it is there? Not as far as I can tell. Besides, people can and do drive between the two counties all the time and can spread the virus easily. Viruses don’t respect city limits, or county lines, or state or national borders.

That’s why we need leaders who know what they’re doing. Yes, some places might need stricter rules than other places, but I would prefer those decisions to be made by epidemiologists and not politicians. It seems like this has turned into a political debate about the role of government instead of anything having to do with science. My county is run by a Democrat, while the county next door is run by a Republican. Is that what makes the difference? My county contains a university that has been shut down and all the students sent home to do their classes online. The county next door has large numbers of elderly people. If anything, it seems to me like they would be in more danger.

I wonder if Easter is going to end up causing a big outbreak, like Marti Gras did in New Orleans. Easter is a big deal around here, especially for the Latino population. Will families stay isolated? Or will they say, “there aren’t really that many deaths here right now, so let’s get together for Easter anyway!”

We’re fighting an invisible enemy, whose effects don’t show up until a week or two after you could have done something to stop it. By the time you have people dying and being put on ventilators as the virus destroys their lungs and steals their breath, it’s too late. We need wisdom and self-discipline and foresight to fight such an enemy. These are the kinds of things that Odin can teach us, if we listen to him.

The Groundhog and Climate Change

Today is Groundhog’s Day (and Imblog for you Celts!), which is when the natural world starts checking to see if it’s safe to emerge from winter sleep and come out for spring.

But this past winter has been very strange. We usually have our first freeze around Thanksgiving, but this year it was on Halloween. That meant we had even fewer trick-or-treaters than usual. Then we didn’t have another freeze until November closer to our usual first freeze time.

Since then, nothing. No freezes in December or January, which is supposed to be the coldest time of year. On my way to work one morning, listening to the news on the radio, they said San Antonio just had it’s first January with no freezes in “over eight decades.”

I’ve scaled way back on my gardening lately because the baby takes up so much time. When it freezes, I usually cover up my pepper plants with frost blankets, and sometimes I can get them to survive the winter, unless we get a really hard freeze. I got the idea because we have wild peppers here, called chile pequins, that can survive the winter for a few years on their own with no help (sometimes the top dies and then the grow back from the roots). I’ve had pepper plants that have survived 3-5 years with my help, until a really hard freeze finally killed them.

This year I didn’t cover my peppers and decided to let them die just because I felt like I was too busy to try to save them. Well, three of them have survived so far, and one jalapeno plant actually bloomed in January and started making peppers again!

I’m not sure how anyone who gardens could deny climate change. It’s so obvious that things aren’t right. Gardening forces you to pay attention to Nature in ways most modern people don’t. Most people don’t need to pay attention to when it freezes, when it rains, etc. When you’re a gardener, those things are really important, so you know when those things are supposed to happen, and when they don’t happen when they’re supposed to, you notice.

There are gardeners who deny climate change though. I’ve seen them on gardening forums. Hardcore gardening, and by that I mean people who don’t just do it causally, but do things like save their own seeds and try to grow all their own vegetables and so on, tends to attract two types of people. There’s the hippie tree-huggers like me, and then there’s the right-wing libertarian types. The latter types are the ones that insist that climate change is made up by some sort of liberal conspiracy to destroy the economy, or something like that.

But for me, this “nice” weather we’ve been having, with highs in the 70s in January almost every day, just tells me that something is very wrong. My apple trees haven’t even bothered to lose their leaves yet.

We’ll have to adjust, but that’s easier said than done, because climate change isn’t changing things uniformly. It would be easy to say if it’s getting warmer, I can plant tomatoes in February instead of March and that will work. Maybe I can start growing avocados and bananas and they will be fine. But last winter we also had very few freezes, and then we had our hardest freeze in March. That was just about the worst time to have a freeze. We had such warm weather in February that most of the plants started coming out of dormancy and blooming, only to get severely damaged when it went down into the low 20’s in March. That turned out to be our last freeze that year, but it was the most damaging.

Is it time to start asking the Groundhog, “is it safe to plant tomatoes yet?” instead of asking how much longer winter will last?

Rainfall has also become very unpredictable. If we were getting uniformly drier, then we could just start gardening like they do in Tuscon. If it was getting uniformly wetter, then we could say Texas is becoming like Miami, and adjust accordingly. Instead, some years it’s Tuscon, and some years it’s Miami, and sometimes it even starts out being Miami and then suddenly switches to Tuscon, drying out all that lush growth. That’s when you get wildfires.

I also worry about mosquitoes. I always really look forward to our first freeze that finally kills most of the mosquitoes. Without freezes, mosquitoes could be active all year. I really hate it when I want to do things outside, but get swarmed with mosquitoes. Sure, I can use repellent, but that stuff is so oily and uncomfortable. It’s nice when I can go without.

And mosquitoes aren’t just annoying. I was lucky that there wasn’t Zika virus found in Texas last summer while I was pregnant, but it was present the summer before. In mosquito season I can’t step outside for five minutes without being bitten. I don’t want to have to wear repellent just to walk from my house to the car to go to work, to avoid catching the newest mosquito-borne disease.

Maybe it’s time for the Groundhog to start warning us about the climate crisis. Animals use to hibernate and migrate at the right times of year. Plants used to know when they were supposed to go dormant and when they were supposed to bloom. Now everything is confused. Punxsutawney Phil should tell that top hat guy, “Spring? I’m still waiting for winter to start!”

Baby’s First Yule

Having a newborn baby is hard. Yes, I knew it would be. That’s what everyone told me, but it’s different to actually experience for myself. I suppose some people might like little babies, but I think I’ll be glad when she’s a little more self-sufficient.

My husband has remarked on how amazing it is that our species has survived with such helpless infants. The only explanation I can figure out is that for most of our history, we’ve had lots of people to help the mother take care of the baby. I now know from personal experience that it makes a huge difference to have just one other person here helping me, versus taking care of her alone. Taking care of her alone is possible, but it sure wears me out. It’s such a relief when her dad gets home from work, or when one of our friends or relatives comes by to visit. But since most people have their own jobs and lives to deal with, most of the time I’m here alone with her.

She turned three months old on the day after Christmas, and she’s already much easier to deal with than during her first month. She usually only wakes up once per night now, instead of 2 or 3 times. I’ve figured out how to tell if she’s hungry or tired or needs a diaper change before she starts crying, usually, so crying has been greatly reduced.

I think that next Yule is going to be when the fun really begins. This year she’s still too young to enjoy most of it. She can’t eat food yet, she can’t sit up yet, she can’t even reach out and grab toys to play with yet.

But that hasn’t stopped us from doing as much as we can with her.

We put up a Yule tree, but since we also adopted two kittens this past summer, we only decorated it with cloth ornaments that can’t be broken if a kitten knocks it off. As far as the kittens are concerned, it’s an Indoor Tree Covered With Cat Toys, and the baby really likes staring at the shiny lights.

As usual, on the night of the solstice, I picked out a nice big heavy oak log out of the woodpile to burn as our Yule log. I lit it in the fireplace at sundown, and let it smolder all night. I used to stay up all night, but in the past few years I’ve usually gone to sleep. This year we went to bed, but then the baby decided we should wake up at 5:30 am, so I was awake in time to see sunrise after the longest night at around 7:30 am.

I have a feeling that once she’s older, she’s going to want to stay up all night on the solstice, because staying up all night is a naughty thing that kids are not usually allowed to do, and kids LOVE doing things like that.

For our solstice feast, we had frozen lasagna. Over the summer, while I was in my second trimester, I made and froze a whole bunch of casseroles, stews, etc. to each once the baby came. So at least it was something homemade. I think I heard somewhere that Italians often eat lasagna for Christmas dinner, so maybe having lasagna for solstice wasn’t so bad after all.

In coming months she will gain the ability to play with a lot more toys, so I sent a wish list to her grandma and grandpa and aunt and uncle with that in mind. She’s got several presents this Yule that we’ll have to save for a few months before giving to her, but that’s OK.

I ended up getting her all Heathen related things. It wasn’t completely planned that way. It just kind of ended up that way.

I had to do most of my gift shopping online this year, since the baby is too young to sit in a shopping cart, so I can only go shopping if Daddy is home, or if I have someone else babysitting her. I did a lot of browsing on Etsy and found some good stocking stuffers for her.

I got her a Thor’s Hammer baby rattle, because I’m a Heathen who also loves superhero movies, so this just looked too fun to pass up.

I also got her this set of teethers for when she starts getting her teeth in a few months. One is shaped like Mjolnir, one is shaped like Sleipnir, and one is shaped like Jormungand. I think that after she’s done using these as teethers, I could still use them as a way to teach her about the gods. Like, “this is Sleipnir. He’s Odin’s horse…” and then tell her the story of how Sleipnir was born.

And speaking of telling her stories, I also ordered Kindertales and Kindertales II to read to her. I’ll try to get around to posting more detailed reviews of those books later. I waited a little too long to order them, so they arrived the day after Christmas, but that’s OK because this is another gift that she’s a bit too young for right now anyway.

I even got around to baking a batch of molasses spice cookies this year. It’s gotten to the point where I can cook and bake, as long as it’s something that won’t take very long. I set up her bouncer in the kitchen so she can watch me. If I change her and feed her right before I begin, I usually have time to make something quick before she needs changing and feeding again. I act like I’m putting on a cooking show for her and explain everything I’m doing. She can’t really understand me, but she seems to enjoy it anyway.

I made the cookie dough in advance, and then formed and baked the cookies on Christmas Eve. It helps if I can break things up into multiple steps like that. That’s how I managed to make pies for Thanksgiving this year (I made the dough for the crust on one day, and then filled and baked them on another day).

So the Yule Father got his customary offering of cookies on Christmas Eve. It won’t be too much longer now until I’ll have a child to give him his cookie offering instead, which is as it should be.

We went to the Christmas Eve service at the UU church that my husband’s parents (who shall henceforth be known as “Grandma and Grandpa”) attend. We sat in the back in case the baby got fussy and we had to slip out early, but that didn’t end up being necessary. She was remarkably well behaved. I propped her up in my lap, and she just sat there wide-eyed listening to the music and the singing and looking at the lights. After the service, lots of people came by to remark on how cute she is and how well behaved she was. She seemed to love the attention.

I was handed a pamphlet about UU Child Dedication, in case I’d be interested in that. I think I might be. They do have some nice children’s events and activities.

As usual we spent the 25th of December at Grandma and Grandpa’s house for the exchange of gifts and Christmas dinner. Some of Grandma’s friends were there also, and the baby again had a great time with getting all the attention from all those people.

I had no prior plans for New Year’s Day, so I offered to cook a feast, since I haven’t done that for a while. I told Grandma I could do it as long as someone else was willing to watch the baby, so she came over to help out. Her sister and brother in law were also in town for New Year’s, so the baby got to meet her great aunt and great uncle.

In Urglaawe it’s customary to have pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s Day. I made pork tenderloin wrapped in bacon, but instead of sauerkraut I made roasted Brussels sprouts with balsamic vinaigrette.  I hope that’s close enough. They’re both cabbagey things. I also made scalloped potatoes, and “Texas Caviar,” which a black-eyed pea salad. Black-eyed peas, of course, being the sacred New Year’s food of the American South.

Grandma’s family is of Pennsylvania Dutch descent (except they’re some of the ones from Ohio, not Pennsylvania), and when I explained to Great Aunt and Great Uncle that you’re supposed to eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s, they said they were always told you have to eat sauerkraut, and that’s a German tradition. So those Urglaawe people didn’t make that up!

I didn’t mention anything aloud about how we’re having this feast in honor of Frey for prosperity in the New Year, because Grandma’s siblings are a bit more Christian than she is, so I hope that Frey still noticed.

For dessert, I made kumquat upside down cake. I have a kumquat tree that ripens its fruits right around Yuletide, and a year or two ago I discovered that I can make a delicious cake by simply substituting sliced kumquats for pineapple in a pineapple upside down cake recipe. When I was a kid my mom used to sometimes make pineapple upside down cake for Christmas in a 9×13 pan with canned pineapple rings and maraschino cherries in the middle of each ring. I thought the gold pineapple and the red cherries looked so pretty and festive!

Now I make upside down cakes in my 10 inch cast iron skillet with fresh fruit, and it’s turning out to be one of my favorite ways to use up the bountiful harvest of kumquats I get most winters. Whenever I make a special holiday meal, I like to include something that I grew and harvested myself, even if it’s just some herbs from the herb garden. This year, the rosemary and garlic on the pork, the rutabagas and leeks that were mixed into the scalloped potatoes, and the kumquats on the cake were all home-grown. Hail Frey!

Yule 2019, my baby’s first Yule, is over. It’s 2020 now. A new year and a new decade! Please gods let it be a good one for my little one to grow up in!

Impeachmas

Now there have been two presidents impeached in my lifetime. Bill Clinton is kind of special to me, because he was the first president that I was old enough to pay attention to. I remember when he was impeached. Back then, the party configuration of the government was reversed, with Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, controlling the House, and Democrats controlling the Senate. I was just thinking of how ironic it is that back then they impeached Clinton for lying about a sexual affair, and now today Republicans are united behind someone like Donald Trump, who lies almost constantly about easily provable things, and has had multiple sexual affairs, which he’s bragged about publicly.

I’ve written before about the alliance that has occurred between white nationalists and Christian theocrats and how scary I think it is. Other people who understand these things better than me have written better things about it. It seems like there’s nothing Trump can do to lose the support of the so-called Moral Majority. Clinton’s personal sexual behavior was absolutely our business, according to them, but it’s OK that Trump had an affair with a porn star right after his wife gave birth to his son.

Mitch McConnell has already said that the Senate trial will be a mere formality, and they’ll acquit Trump as quickly as possible. If Trump has done nothing wrong, if he really didn’t try to get another country to meddle in our elections, then why not have a fair trial? Surely that would then prove his innocence. The only explanation I can think of is that they know that Trump did all the things that the Democrats say he did, and they still want to stick behind him anyway. Perhaps Trump really could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any support. They’d probably say the guy he shot had it coming.

It seems like Republicans don’t really believe in anything anymore besides Us vs. Them, so as long as Trump is a Republican, they’ll back him no matter what. I don’t know what values or principles they have anymore besides that.

It’s not very different from how conservative Christians view the world. Anyone who isn’t a Christian, or even anyone who isn’t the right kind of Christian, is pure evil and deserves to burn in Hell. You can be the nicest Jew, Hindu, Muslim, Heathen, Wiccan, or atheist who ever lived, and still go to Hell just because you’re not a member of the right religion. On the other hand, if you are a member of the right religion, you can do pretty much anything you want and you’ll be forgiven.

What you do doesn’t matter, it only matters what “side” you’re on.

I could be experiencing a bit of postpartum depression here, so now I feel a bit bad about making a pre-Yule post that’s so depressing.

Yule is about how we’ve made it halfway through the dark, and the winter will not last forever, and spring will come. Sometimes that’s harder to believe than other times. I worry about my little baby daughter and what kind of country and world she’s going to live in.

Tonight is another Democratic debate. Any of these people would be better than Trump, but I also worry about the 2020 election either way. Either he’ll be re-elected (possibly with more help from Russia), or he won’t be and his rabid followers were be in an uproar and probably say the election was rigged by the Deep State.

It’s nice to hear people talk about taking climate change seriously, or trying to fix our broken healthcare system, but is any of that really going to get done?

The Moomins

My husband’s father was a civilian working for the Air Force, so when he was a kid the family moved around a lot. He spent a big chunk of his childhood in a village in England called Fritwell. He told me that he lived there long enough that when they moved back to the United States, he had an English accent for a while until he managed to change it into the generic-American accent he has today.

This also means he grew up with English children’s popular culture, some of which is just not well known here on the other side of the pond. Some of his favorite books from when he was a kid were the ones about the Moomins.

The Moomins are a family of trolls that are the main characters in a series of children’s books by Swedish/Finnish author Tove Jansson. The are popular in Scandinavia, Britain, and pretty much all of the rest of Europe, but just never really hit it big in the United States. There’s even a Moomin theme park in Finland!

It’s a shame that they aren’t better known here, not only because I think they’re adorable, but I think they’d be especially good for Heathen kids. The stories have a definite Heathen feel to them, but I guess that’s to be expected since it seems to me like Scandinavians only adopted Christianity halfway anyway.

The books have been adapted into several different television shows, even a Japanese anime version which seems to be very popular (or at least very easy to find on YouTube), but our favorite version is the Polish stop-motion animation one, which fans refer to as “the fuzzy felt Moomins.”

Since Yule is starting this weekend, here are some seasonally appropriate episodes of the Moomin TV series. You see, Moomins usually hibernate during the winter, but one winter our main protagonist, Moonintroll, woke up and got to see what goes on during the winter.

Here’s where they woke up in time for Christmas, and Moominmama misunderstands what people are talking about when people say “Christmas is coming,” and thinks Christmas is a person.:

The Lady of the Cold, who sure looks like Skadhi to me:

The Winter Bonfire, built by the woodland creatures to welcome back the sun after the long, dark Scandinavian winter:

Each of these episodes corresponds to a chapter in one of the books. They seem like they’d make excellent bedtime stories for my daughter once she’s old enough to appreciate them.

Raising Pagan Babies

Whether to raise one’s children pagan or heathen is one of those topics that comes up periodically on pagan blogs. People get into heated arguments about whether it’s bad to “indoctrinate” one’s children this way, instead of “letting them find their own path.” I tried to stay out of those conversations since I didn’t have children of my own. I know there are few things parents seem to hate worse than people without children giving them parenting advice.

However, that’s about to change. It took longer than I had originally planned for, but if everything continues to go well, the question of how to raise a pagan child is going to become not hypothetical at all for me in the near future!

So here’s my opinion on whether pagans should raise pagan kids: Of course! I really don’t see why not. I always thought it was strange that it’s so controversial. I doubt any other religious groups would even question this.

But I understand. Most modern pagans are converts from Christianity, and many of them are still bitter about it. They resent being “indoctrinated” into Christianity and don’t want to impose the same thing on their children. Since religion was imposed on them, maybe even in an abusive way, they don’t know how to raise children in a religion correctly. They might even think there is no right way to do it. That makes sense.

And I also think it’s yet some more of that “Christian baggage” that we really need to get over and move past if we want modern polytheism to survive past this generation. Relying solely on converts probably won’t be enough. We need second-generation pagans to be a thing. Besides, people raise their children to believe what they believe about all kinds of things, not just religion. I thought that was just how parenting works. (Then when the kids become teenagers, they decide their parents are stupid and wrong about everything anyway!)

Heathens, with our emphasis on ancestors and tradition, seem to have less of a problem with this than Wiccans. But I still think it’s a topic worth exploring, even if you think raising your kids to be Heathens is the right thing to do. You still probably weren’t raised Heathen yourself, so you still might have Christian baggage and struggle with figuring out how to do it in the right way.

I don’t think this is something to be taken lightly. It takes serious thought. Luckily, I wasn’t raised Christian to begin with. I was raised atheist in a Christian-dominated culture. That still gives me baggage I have to overcome, but hopefully less than if I was raised in a fundamentalist evangelical Christian household. I’m not worried that my kids will go to Hell if they end up believing the wrong things.

I’m not going to pretend I know how to do this right, either. I’m going to have to figure it out as I go along (like everything else about being a parent). It’s really a shame that Heathens and other modern pagans don’t have the kind of community support that other religions do. It probably makes it much easier to raise kids in a certain religion if you are part of a religious community that welcomes children and has activities for them to participate in.

There is a pagan organization in my area that holds two festivals a year, one at Beltane and one at Samhain, and children are allowed. My husband and I have been a few times, but it’s been years since we last went, and even while we were there, my husband felt a bit uncomfortable with the idea of bringing hypothetical future children to that event. The children are kind of segregated off into their own area where theoretically they should be “safe” from the alcohol (and other drug) use and blatantly sexual activities, but there are always still rumors of teenage girls getting oogled by old creepy men or minors being given alcohol or other drugs. And yes I know these kinds of things can happen in other religious groups too (ahem, Catholic Church), but I’m not in any other religious groups, so that’s not really my problem.

My husband and I have been going to a smaller, different campout more often. The irony is that children are not allowed at all there, but I would actually feel safer having my kid around those people. They seem to be better at respecting boundaries and not being creepy, but by Samhain I’m going to have a little baby, so I can’t go to that one anymore, because no babies allowed.

The only other option I can think of right now is the local Unitarian Universalist Church where my husband’s parents go. My husband and I attend irregularly, but maybe once we have the kid, we will start attending more regularly. They welcome parents of young children and have a Sunday school and special events for them. On the other hand, they are UU’s. That’s OK; I agree with all the UU principles and beliefs, and I don’t mind my kid learning about them, but we’d have to do our heathen things at home, I guess.

To me it seems like this illustrates a difference in the overall attitude these two organizations have towards children. At the pagan festival, the children are kept segregated from the main events in their own separate area. You could go there and hardly ever encounter a child if you stay out of the children’s area. Children are allowed there, as long as most people don’t have to be around them.

At a UU service, everyone starts out together, they bring the children to the front and tell them a little story that has to do with the topic of the day, and then the kids go off to the Sunday school area while the adults have our adult discussions about the topic of the day. Then at the end the kids come back for refreshments with everyone else. The children are treated like they are an important part of the community.

I think the latter is more like how most religious organizations treat children, because they think it’s important to pass their traditions and beliefs on to the next generation.

I’ve gone to a couple of Native American pow-wows, and I kind of wish that pagan festivals were more like that, at least in some ways. There the kids are also treated like they are valuable, with certain rituals and dances where the kids are encouraged to be involved in, right there under the main tent where everybody congregates. Adults-only things that kids wouldn’t be interested in anyway were mostly set off to the side in their own areas, kind of the reverse of the way the pagan festival was set up. Of course, Native Americans were also victims of genocide, so it makes perfect sense that they are very much in favor of having kids. It’s like my Jewish friend who told me that Jews are also very pro-kid because every Jewish child born is sticking it to Hitler.

I know children are not everyone’s thing. I’m sometimes not even sure if it’s going to be my thing, and here I am intentionally making one right now! (Oh my gosh, what have I gotten myself into?) So I’m not saying that our festivals and organizations need to be all about kids all the time, with no adults-only spaces or activities. But even if I didn’t end up having a kid myself, I think that on a community level they should be treated as something valuable rather than merely tolerated, if we care at all about polytheism continuing after we’re gone. And I guess that depends on if you think paganism is just about personal fulfillment, or if it’s something greater than yourself.