I would like to wish everyone a very happy Imbolc (or Candlemas, or Groundhog Day).

For pagans, Imbolc is a festival of light to celebrate the coming of spring, honoring the sun’s slow return to power in the sky. This is a time of thoughtfulness, or finding the light that resides within us, of focusing on unseen potentialities, banishing inner shadows and sweeping out the old.
The emphasis is on light, rather than heat, on the strengthening spark of light beginning to pierce the gloom of winter. The returning light brings the promise of returning life, the days are lengthening, lending assurance that the Wheel of the Year is turning, and that summer will return.
Themes for this sabbat include contemplation, providence, health, opportunity and change.

Blessed be.

quote:

Originally posted by Elexina:
Imbolc is a festival of light to celebrate the coming of spring,

we also have a festival in our part of the world (Lahore and surroundings) where a festival called 'Basant'. It originated to welcome the spring. Its a kite flying or rather kite fighting festival. Now its just about kite flying/fighting.
Its goes for a month and generally the skies of Lahore city is full of kites on certain days and nights.

Hope you all remembered to take down your Christmas (pagan?) decorations at Candlemas, February 2nd ! The practice of taking them down at Twelfth Night, January 6th, is comparatively recent. In former times the date for this was Candlemas. It's also the date when the church restocked its store of candles as well as the festival when candles were carried in procession, symbolising Christ's arrival as 'the light of the world'.

(And, of course, all we men went back to work on the first Monday after Christmas, didn't we? That was Plough Monday.Women were supposed to resume on the Tuesday but that practice was a nonsense: they'd been working all through Christmas )

I took down the majority of my Yule decorations on Twelfth Night, and the rest on the 31st. I still have some non-Yule-related wintry things up, but I should be okay with those.

Wishing a joyeux joyeux Imbolc to one and all!