In Which I Get A Gift From The Dead

You'll have to excuse this post. I'm writing it from my phone, having recently installed the Blogger app on my phone. As a touch typist, it's utterly annoying, but The Hubster is playing Zynga Poker on the laptop and I'm reduced to using the phone, on the sofa, while snuggling under a blanket and watching the last ever two episodes of Charmed. (Cheesy, but I DON'T CARE, and anyway I missed these episodes years ago!)

The Hubster took a couple of days off from work so we could venture a little further afield for a trip out. We started off at the park, playing hide and seek with Witchlet One. He always cheats - he can't stick to one spot and always moves, and when you do find him, there's always a reason why it "doesn't count"! The park is next to the cemetery, so I lifted Witchlet Two over the wall and we had a wander. The first thing we noticed was a brand new memorial stone at the back of cemetery. This was near the untended grave that Papa led me to eighteen months ago. It's a memorial for four generations of a family, and it seems rather poignant that someone is honouring their blood ancestors in this way so very close to where I've honoured my ancestors.

Witchlet Two and I went to check on "my" grave, especially to check on the snowdrops I planted last year. The leaves had come up, but no flowers this year. Which is perfectly normal for transplanted snowdrops the first year; the important thing is that the bulbs have survived. I bet there will be flowers next year.

Witchlet Two decided she wanted a flower at this point, so I explained why she couldn't take flowers from the tended graves. She nodded solemnly, and then I spotted a large patch of crocuses under the willow right in the middle of the cemetery. No harm in picking two or three crocuses for Witchlet Two amongst the hundreds of blooms there. So I did, and she was thrilled.

She then deliberately chose three graves to put a flower on each. Like a complete bloody idiot, I didn't take note of which three graves, I was just so fascinated to watch her choose carefully, tipping her head to one side, tapping her chin with one finger while deciding. She placed each flower down gently, patting the ground as she did before skipping off to the next one. We met up with The Hubster and Witchlet One as we went back up the hill. (It's always struck me as mildly silly to have a cemetery on a hill, all the gravestones eventually keel over and start a slow procession down, but it does make for a spectacular view!). Witchlet One doesn't like the cemetery much. He's very aware of his own mortality, which is odd for a seven year old, and it scares him a little. Plus they play "Zombies" in the school playground (shockingly, some of the kids in Witchlet One's year seem to be watching The Walking Dead - which scares the living shit out of me.). Time to leave, then.

We headed out to the local RSPB sanctuary for a walk after that. The Witchlets were charged with the job of looking out for signs of spring - they duely found fresh leaf shoots on the hawthorn - and then to look for "treasures" - stones, feathers, anything that sparked their interest. This of course soon resulted in me weighed down with two pockets full of stones and carrying a handful of sticks!

As we walked by a small stream, I spotted the remains of a swan on the other side. I really wanted to cross the stream and pay my respects, but I didn't want to bring it to the attention of Witchlet One - he would have been inconsolable. (A common belief about autism is that autistic kids have no empathy. Witchlet One has empathy in spades, and can be devastated when people are hurt, or upset, but dead animals are the worst for him.). I wanted a feather or two from the swan, and as I turned to walk on, there on the path in front of me was a large white feather. Thanks, swan, gifts like that are so meaningful. Not sure what I'm going to do with it as yet - but there's some potent magic there, I'm sure of it.

Oh, and it's taken me four days to write this damn post on my bloody phone!

Midwinter Challenge - Holy Supper Part IV

Yes, this is it: the very last bit of our Midwinter Magic/Holy Supper challenge. From Ms G D’s original challenge here, and my Part I, Part II and Part III. This is the end, I promise!

Originally we were planning to wassail the apple tree the evening after our Holy Supper, but frankly we were all utterly exhausted (not to mention stuffed to the gills with serious amounts of yummy food). So we planned to do it on Christmas Eve, but that kinda went by the wayside as I had a LOT of cooking to do for a gathering of the husbands family the following day (eighteen of the in-laws all in one place? Yes, folks, and I survived without any inappropriate comments, bursting into tears or wanting to turn people into toads, which we can count as a complete success!) so we delayed it until New Year’s Eve…. And failed. Hubby’s work, a tantrum melt-down by two over-excited, over-chocolated Witchlets caused Witch Mother to shelve plans and strop about the kitchen muttering obscenities under her breath.

So what day did we do it on? Twelfth Night. The day it’s traditionally done. The day I originally dismissed as “Oh yeah, that’s the proper day, but I know better and we are going to do it when I want.” (Slap me round the head with the ancestor stick; I should know better by now not to try and do things AT THE WRONG FRIGGIN’ TIME.)

Our apple tree was grown from a pip the year I conceived Witchlet One, and it’s never flowered. It’s about nine feet tall now, and is happy enough, but I would love to see it flower (and be even more delighted to see it fruit!) and that would be BIG MAGIC MOJO APPLES.

Traditions of Apple Wassail

"In Southern England a...set of customs...was grouped under the name of wassailing. They consisted, in essence, of wishing health to crops and animals much as people passing the wassail bowl wished it to each other. Most are well recorded in the early modern period, and they may quite easily have descended directly from pagan practices, although it is also possible that they developed outwards from the domestic wassail. The most widespread, famous, and enduring concerned fruit trees. It is first mentioned at Fordwich, Kent, in 1585, by which time it was already in part the preserve of groups of young men who went between orchards performing the rite for a reward. Robert Herrick, almost certainly writing about Devon and in the 1630s, spoke of 'wassailing' the fruit-bearing trees in order to assure good yields, and in the 1660s and 1670s a Sussex clergyman gave money to boys who came to 'howl' his orchard (being the enduring local term). John Aubrey, describing West Country customs in the same period, said that on Twelfth Eve men 'go with their wassel-bowl into the orchard and go about the trees to bless them, and put a piece of toast upon the roots, in order to it.'" - From The Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton

　

I baked soda bread for toasting, and then I made Lamb’s Wool, a traditional drink to toast the orchard trees with:

Recipe Ingredients:
1.5 Litres (3 x 500ml bottles) of traditional real ale – or traditional cider (I used an organic Devon cider)
6 small apples, cored (I used British Cox apples)
1 nutmeg freshly grated (I only used about half a nutmeg, which seemed plenty)
1 tsp ground ginger
150g brown sugar
　
Recipe Method:

Preheat the oven 120 deg C.

Prepare the apples in advance: time it so they are ready when you want to put them into the lambswool to serve.

Core the 6 apples fully, getting rid of the pips. Lightly grease the baking tray. Place the apples on the baking tray about 6cm (2 inches) apart – they will swell up a little. Bake the apples at 120 deg C for about an hour or so until they become soft and pulpy and the skins are easy to peel away.

　

Make the Lamb’s wool:

In a large thick bottomed saucepan (which is quite tall to avoid splashes when whisking) add the sugar. Cover the sugar in a small amount of the ale (or cider) and heat gently. Stir continuously until the sugar has dissolved. Then add in the ground ginger and grate in the whole (or half, in my case!) of the nutmeg. Stir, and keeping the pan on a gentle simmer, slowly add in all the rest of the ale (or cider). Leave for 10 minutes on a gentle heat as you deal with the apples.

　

Take the baked apples out of the oven to cool slightly for 10 minutes – they should now be soft and pulpy.

Break open the apples and scoop out the baked flesh into a bowl, discarding the skin. Then take a fork and mash this apple pulp up, while it is still warm, into a smooth purée with no lumps. Add the apple puree into the ale (or cider) lamb’s wool, mixing it in with a whisk.

Let the saucepan continue to warm everything through for thirty minutes, on a very gentle heat, until ready to drink. When warmed through use the whisk again for a couple of minutes to briskly froth the drink up and mix everything together. The apple will float to the surface, and depending on how much you have whisked it, the more it looks like lamb’s wool.

I will stop and apologise here: I had some brilliant pictures of this. Fantastic ones. I transferred them to a folder on the damn ‘puter, before deleting them from the camera. I know I did. SO WHERE THE FUCK ARE THEY NOW? HMMM?

Any way, I served up the Lamb’s Wool in mugs for hubby and I, and Witchlet Two got a TINY little bit watered down with apple juice. Witchlet One took a look, and proclaimed his verdict - “Yuck.”

We went outside with our steaming mugs, and platefuls of the toasted soda bread (which Witchlet Two was already tucking into, she can’t resist a bit of toast). Out came the tambourines, the drums, the shakers and a couple of sticks, and we all yelled and made noise by the tree, shouting out any bad spirits. (By the second mug of Lamb’s Wool, I kinda got into it.) The Witchlets were in their element; after a brief glance at each other (“Mummy is ASKING us to yell, make noise and hit something? Wow!”) they joined in with gusto.

We lifted them up in our arms so they could spear slices of toast soaked in Lamb’s Wool on the tree branches. Finally I recited:

“Apple tree, apple tree, we all come to wassail thee
Apple tree, stand fast root, every little twig bear fruit
Hats full, caps full, and three score sacks full, Hip! Hip! Hurrah!”

It took a bit of time to herd two extraordinarily excited Witchlets back inside, but the promise of hot chocolate with straws AND chocolate sprinkles finally did the trick.

And so ends the Midwinter Magic. Magic it has definitely been, and it’s something that we will do every year. It added so much to the festive season for us as a family, not just for me, the Witch. And perhaps, twenty or thirty years from now, maybe the Witchlets might be doing something similar with their babes. (And I’ll be sat having a quiet cackle with the Ancestors in the corner, hogging the last of the Lamb’s Wool.)

In which I get a phone call....

It’s extremely hard keeping track of your dreams when you have two young Witchlets who consider five in the morning a suitable time to get up and jump on your bed. Time to write down my dream? No chance. Time to even go over it in my head? You’ve got to be joking. Believe me, the gods tell me things, The Old Man has a good old time and Hekate teaches me in my dreams. This I know. It’s very, very frustrating to just lose it all because I am accosted by my offspring each and every morning. I know it’s still in there, somewhere, but I have no idea how to access it. Still, I am ultimately grateful when I do manage to retain a glimpse of the hidden nocturnal world. I woke up at three o’clock (yes, in the wee small hours) yesterday with full recollection of a very short dream. In it, my mobile had rung with the tune “Let it Snow”, and when I answered it, Mother Elder said “I’m coming. If you want to save your pelargoniums, dahlias and begonia, do it now.” And then I woke up.

Well, something as direct as that definitely has to be acted on. So, in the five hours of kid-free time I had yesterday, I decanted the dahlias from their containers, absolutely chuffed to find that they had produced HUGE hand-like tubers in one year:

(I grew ‘em from seed this year - go me!) So I brushed them off to go into the greenhouse (also known as the four-tier plastic covered shelving unit, but greenhouse sounds like I REALLY know what I’m doing), along with the one surviving begonia (eight corms bought this year; a real extravagance. Four didn’t do anything at all, two rotted off, and one more got attacked by vine weevils) and two gorgeous orange-red pelargoniums, pruned back and re-potted. The last, and biggest of the pelargoniums is still in full flower, so I’ve brought it indoors and told it that it’s on holiday. 

Just imagine you’re in the Med, my dear, I said, and stuck it on the dining room table with a fervent prayer that the pot is too big and heavy for the Witchlets to knock off.

Just as I was about to finish up for the day, the postman arrived with my pot of the necrofuckingtastic plum rum sauce from Ms Graveyard Dirt. Just for good measure, she stuck in a plum pit and some wheat seeds (getting a package from Ms Dirty is always a delight; the wheat seeds came in the most adorable little envelope), so off I went back to the garden to plant both pit and wheat. I’ve had quite a bit of luck with growing trees from seed - numerous apple trees from seeds, a nectarine, holly, rowan and even a walnut (although that was Witchlet One really - he stuck it half in to a pot of compost and I was shocked to find that it germinated!) - so we’ll see how the plum pit goes. Give it ten years, I might be weighed under by 24lbs of plums!!

And while I was lugging various pots about the garden, I discovered a pot of spring onions I sowed back in May and forgot about.  What a bonus!

So, Mother Elder, thanks for the warning. Bring on your frost and your snow; cover my garden in your carpet of frozen white. I am ready for you now, I offer my garden up to your care for the winter. Take that which is your right, and I will gladly take the garden back from you in the spring.