How Do You Celebrate the Sabbats With Your Children?

“How do I celebrate *insert any sabbat here* with my kids?”

This question is asked every other month around the entire year. Individuals without children ask it as well, but being an educator and mother, I’m going to address the child aspect of the sabbats. For those unaware, popularized by the Wiccan Wheel of the Year, most nature based and pre-Christian traditions observe eight nature-based holidays. They are the solstices (yule & midsummer or simply solstice), the equinoxes (Ostara and Mabon) and the four cross quarters, the times between the equinoxes and solstices, which are Imbolic, Baltane, Lammas and Samhain. These holidays revolve around the season and agriculture where as the Abrahamic holidays tend to revolve around days of remembrance (Jesus’s Birth, the giving of the Torah etc.). I believe that many parents struggle with making the sabbats feel special for two reasons, and I’ll address each in length.

The first of which is because in today’s modern, western culture, we are highly disconnected from nature. These sabbats, these holidays, are nature celebrations. It is a struggle when most, if not all of our lives we hardly acknowledge nature to then revolve around it, celebrate it and savor it. In the past couple decades, there have been movements to better connect with nature and that is a good thing, but over all we are still largely disconnected. Our ancestors, and I don’t mean great grandma, absolutely required a connection with nature in order to survive. Today we do not, so we tend to think. We can go into a grocery store and find produce year-round, we grow food in green houses, we feed livestock special diets and even inject them with hormones in order for them to grow faster. Food insecurity is a major issue in America, but the most food-insecure regions are still more food secure than all of humanity was 8000 years ago. We have furnaces to keep our homes warm in the winter and air-conditioning to keep us cool in the summer. Our cars are the same when it comes to travel; we have cars to get to places faster and don’t have to plan for a three-day walk for a resource. The biggest weather threats are natural disasters such as floods or tornados, which are very real threats. Daily threats that our ancestors dealt with are minor decisions in our day. Do I need an umbrella? Should I warm up the car? We are not connected to nature because we began to believe that we don’t need to be, and for immediate survival we don’t. Because of that mindset, we are seeing the long-term costs of climate change.

So how do we reconnect with nature, with children and the sabbats? There isn’t going to be a one-size fits all answer. Do something regional. I admit I have a hard time connecting with Imbolic. Imbolic is between winter solstice and the spring equinox. It is a holiday celebrating signs of spring returning. Where I live, that is a very difficult thing for my modern-self, with a furnace and Keurig, to notice. Typically, on Imbolic I’ll have inches, if not feet, of snow on the ground outside. For my modern life, there are not signs of spring that impact my life, but the signs that are there were a huge impact on all of our ancestors. The sun is setting about an hour later then it was at solstice. It’s rising about an hour sooner. Those two extra hours of light, where I live, would be a massive change for peoples before electricity, dependent upon fire for light and warmth. Further north where winters night lasts days, weeks or even a month, the sun is a massive change. Acknowledging the importance of that change is a great first step. Sure, we might not much noticed the difference in the sunlight, but the animals around us sure do and that is something children connect with: animals. Animals may start waking up from hibernation, or be out more as they look for more food. The earth “waking up” from winter isn’t just the garden growing. It’s all of the creatures beginning to stir. A great day to celebrate is to make bird feeders with bread and honey covered in seed. Hang them from trees or poles. The birds and other animals will greatly appreciate the Imbolic help.

The second reason, I feel, many people struggle with make holidays feel special is because we tend to compare them to the western counter parts. Halloween, Christians and Easter. I have often referred to Christmas as “holiday crack” because it is addictive and often unavoidable. These holidays are big, commercial, filled with bright colors and fun toys. They also all have their origins into their pre-chrisitan counter parts (Samhain, Yule and Ostara respectively). Christmas, while the celebration of the birth of Jesus is a holiday filled with gifts, candy, cookies, special food, special pjs, special clothes, special tv shows and songs, lights all over town, special activities, a fully decorated house, magical reindeer that fly, cards, stories, greeting one another (isn’t it sad that a greeting has become rare?) and most of all… special time with family. On top of all of that, nearly everyone in America does it. How do you compete with that? You don’t. Anticlimactic, maybe even a letdown… but you don’t. I understand the feeling of “my children will feel left out” I truly do. Christmas cannot be competed with, not in modern America. Numbers alone will make it feel more special. Something about these holidays which devout Christians bring up often is that they’re faux. Absolutely nothing that makes Christians special has anything to do with Jesus. The celebrations are not fake, but they are faux. Halloween has many of the same elements as Christians just toned down a couple notched and a couple more notches for Ostara. The root problem is the same, those holidays are highly celebrated by most of our neighbors and the establishments around us. We do not need to make any holiday compete with them and parents, please know that your child will be fine. Rising them connected to nature and celebrating nature will help them live a connected life. Struggles we may have grounding and connecting to nature, they will not have. And at the same time, we do not need to avoid an activity because it’s intended for Christmas. Most Christmas traditions come form Yule as is. Decorate the house, drive to the light displays, listen to the music. Decorate a yule tree if you like. It’s okay.

So to the question of how to make the sabbats special? Make them special. They don’t need flying reindeer to be special. You can do decorations, you can do gifts, you can sing songs and wear special clothes. For each sabbat observe nature in your region during that time and have a festive activity that matches. In the general new England region, it may mean making bird feeders for Imbolic and visiting farms for Lammas. For southern New Mexico it might mean starting your garden for Imbolic and making homemade ice-cream for Lammas. Everyone can visit graves or make an ancestor altar for Samhain. Have a cookout or potluck and celebrate the sun for the solstices. Celebrate fertility of the earth, growing and fresh starts for Ostara. Dye eggs, Ostara originated that. Celebrate the first harvests for Baltane, where I live that’s about when the spring produce gets harvested. For all the sabbats, when you can, celebrate outside. I understand this isn’t always possible. Connect with nature in a way that suits your region and your family. Your kids love mud? Make a mud pit for then for baletane. Sure it’ll be messy but they’ll have fond, nature based memories of the sabbats.