My favorite thing about gathering around a bonfire is that people have been doing this forever, for millions of years, since there were people. This is what people do and have always done. When we gather together, light a fire, share a meal, look up at the sky and tell each other stories, we participate in the most ancient traditions of mankind.
Last Saturday night our family gathered together, like we do every year, to celebrate…fall? Halloween? My father’s birthday? Maybe we were just celebrating. We picked the night of the full moon without much question. Of course there were days of house cleaning and garden clearing and end of season preparations beforehand. We spent the afternoon gathering the fallen branches and brush from the property, stacking them up for the bonfire, teaching the little ones how to do it. We gathered together a feast. The children mobbed around their uncle, mesmerized as he made them each a roasting stick. We each brought stories to tell, both new and old ones. Some were accounts of events, some entirely made up, most were a little of both.
The end of the harvest season was celebrated as the end of the year by my pre-Christian ancestors in northern Europe, England, Scotland, Ireland and Scandinavia, even in Rome they shared the same type of holidays this time of year. They picked the night of the full moon too. They harvested and put up food, they cleaned their fields and gardens, they cleaned their homes and purified them with herbs and made preparations for the cold season ahead. In some Celtic tribes they extinguished their hearth fires as they cleared away the year past, to start the new year with a clean slate. The new year’s celebrations began the night before (some celebrations lasted days!) with a feast and sacred fire. There was dancing and story telling and prayers. As the night drew to a close, each family would take with them flame from the sacred fire, to relight their hearth and to begin the new year with the intentions they had infused into that fire the night before.
The fire remains sacred, whether we think of it that way or not. A feeling of connection and reverence sneaks up on us when we realize the rhythm of our lives today still shadow the lives of our ancestors so many years ago. How many times have my grandparents lit the fire, told the stories, brought up the little ones, and cleaned up the garden? Even while I rush through my to-do list trying to prepare for the cold season ahead, I think my mothers’ mothers were doing precisely this same thing. It kinda softens the blow of all this work I still need to do. I wonder what was on their list?
We’ve already harvested and preserved our food, and I’ve done some yard clean up, but I hate to miss anything. You are welcome to steal my End of Season List if it helps you too!
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