Create your own seasonal rituals

I've just been speaking in my last two podcasts about working out what our values are and holding our boundaries to them. This is something that's quite relevant as we lead up to this festive period around the end of December. 

There was a big time in my life where I felt really disconnected from the festivities because I was in a space where my values were really wanting to align with the Wheel of the Year. Yet I was surrounded by festivities that were more aligned with winter traditions that are so woven into the celebrations of Christmas. 

I wanted to infuse that this is Summer. This is Summer Solstice and we are celebrating Litha, that the world is alive, our energy is bursting with with joy to be able to share and celebrate with everybody in our community... And that was where it came together.

That's where we were able to weave the energy of the festivities of Christmas with the energy of Litha, leaning into our values really helped me to embrace this period, by bringing them both together. 

For me, Solstice energy is all about coming together. It's all about the gratitude for what we have and can share with those we care for. Taking care of our our home and inviting people into our home, into our space and sharing food that we have grown or that was sourced locally. We've got a lot of pride in being able to share this abundance with family and friends and people that we care about. Sharing a solstice feast, having a solstice gathering has been important to us over the last few years, cementing this energy for us. 

Christmas festivities of the family lunches, decorating the trees with lights and the baking and treats has got that energy that's aligned with your values of the sharing of the abundance and the gratitude that we have to be able to give. That's the energy that I want to pass through and it is that Solstice energy already. 

We count down to the festivities, the Advent, this this year, we've done unwrap a book a day, which we read together after breakfast. I got the idea from beautiful friend of mine, she wraps up a christmas book that they unwrap every day up until Christmas Day. We didn't have as many Christmas books so we blended it in with Solstice books, these are books about it being summer time about sunflowers about activities that you would do in the summer you can read my blog on it here. We'd have some Christmas books to be unwrapped there as well. Along with books about celebrating in different parts of the world. Sourcing books that share and teach us about how other cultures celebrate festivities and what these mean to them is a great opportunity to open up opportunities for our children to get to know that everybody has different belief systems.

It's ok for our children to know that some people do believe in Santa and some people don't. I'm not one that has really put a big emphasis on Santa in our house, I've let our children come to their own conclusion based on what they have seen around them. We go with more of the the energy of believing in the magic of it. It's a story for us and it's up to them to feel into how much of that they want to embrace or just let it slide. We definitely don't do the santa surveillance or insist that they need to be good or they won't get presents. We try and instill that our children they're always good. It's not about putting those labels on in order to be worthy enough to receive presents. You're always loved and you're always receiving is what we're sharing. 

It's been a bit of a fine line to walk over the years to get to this point of surrendering to the process of just allowing them all to overlap. There was a time there when I was trying to shut down everything Christmas and ignore it all and say that that's all crazy and not aligned with the season. It's not it's not winter here. We do yule in June. We do Solstice, Litha now. I was very adamant on that. But that wasn't working for me, that was making me feel like I was coming from a place of lack at this time of year. That energydid not feel right either. 

This is why I say that being aligned with your values is really the most important aspect because when we come back to what are our values around this time of year, we can still celebrate is a way that honours both. It's about the joy. Like going to see the lights, it's beautiful to go out in the evening in the summer, there are definetly aspects that that we can still enjoy. Sharing the story of Jesus and the Christian beliefs that go with Christmas is an opportunity to teach our children about how everybody is celebrating in their own way around the world. These stories come from lots of different places and there's lots of different traditions and cultures that we can learn from. There's great books that you can source that teach you about the different stories around the world, just by just exploring and being open to the opportunities to be able to expand our consciousness and say that the world isn't all very small and self centered. 

You can make up your own mind about what you want to take on board for your families rituals. What are the rituals that you want to include? You can build your own seasonal rituals around the aspects that bring you joy, that bring you gratitude, that show sharing abundance, sharing and being able to spend time with loved ones. This is something that you can build in your own way. There's no right or wrong way on how to celebrate Solstice or Christmas or how ever you are wanting to do it. 

As long as you align with your values, and as long as you are really connecting with your children and listening to their values as well. This is what brings you together and connects you is spending the time together. But not just spending the time together doing what you think is the right way. Believe me, I as I said before, tried that path and it left us feeling like we were in lack. My kids feeling like they were missing out on some special things and it made me feel like I wasn't delivering as magical time or festivities as they had imagined. This is why collaborating with your family with your kids and listening to what their values and their needs are as well. Then you can really shape your seasonal rituals to be supportive of the family connection while still honoring what's important to you. 

We have our tree up, it's a plastic tree that we got gifted when my husband and I first moved into our house together back when we were 20, so a long time ago now and we've kept that tree and our decorations are even the same purple baubles that we had when we very first decorated that tree all that time ago, but now it is full of the kids craft. It's beautiful, they have woven suns with wool around sticks, painted and glitterfied seed pods that they've found in the gardens. This year we are repurposing my old summer dresses that have worn thin and got tears in them so I can't wear them anymore. We're repurposing them by sewing them into hearts for decorations. Making garland's of sunflowers, making dehydrated oranges. 

Oranges are something that are used in the winter solstice quite regularly as well because it's a fruit that you dehydrate it to make it last through the winter is tradition. But in the summer there is an abundance of oranges especially where we live in the sunshine states. And we've got so many oranges around we can make these orange garland's as a sign of the sun and summer and it works with both. 

These activities are really building on that time together. It's creative processes that are infusing our values with what's important to us and bringing us together and sharing with the people in our life that we love and want to include in our rituals of togetherness. 

There is no right or wrong way to do this. There is only the way that aligns with what you feel is going to bring you closer to what you value what is important to you, what you want to invest your time and energy into. That's where we lean back on to the last podcast episode of the boundaries, if it doesn't feel good, change it. That doesn't mean that you have to completely cut it out. But if it doesn't feel good, you can alter it into what will. Slow down and listen to that feeling, if this doesn't feel right, what part of that is not feeling right for you what part of it is misaligned for you. For example, we call our christmas tree a solstice tree and instead of decorating it with snowflakes or snowman or other winter imagery, we decorate it with sunflowers and oranges and brightly colored floral dresses cut out into hearts and beautiful gold tinsel that is warming and that's what the summer solstice or Litha is to us. We've got fairies hanging in the tree. We've got mermaids in our tree. We've got dinosaurs in our tree. 

The Evergreen pine tree that we use as our Christmas tree these days was traditionally bought inside to keep the forest creatures, the elves and fae, safe from the cold winter snow. Or perhaps it's brought inside to remind you of some source of life in the evergreen tree that doesn't drop its green leaves over the winter. We bring it inside to bring a sense of nature within. But here in my home in summer we have all of our windows open we have all of our doors open and all of the warm summer air coming in and flowing out. It's an open area because it's hot and is bright and we're bringing that outside in within our home. Whilst we don't need that aspect of bringing nature inside because nature is all around us and we are nature, the tree is that pillar that connects us to the season. 

Also, it's okay to be able to bring in some aspects of what your cultural celebrations have been, what your family have done the nostalgia of decorating the tree as a child, all of those things we don't need to completely give away in order to create our own seasonal rituals. We can simply blend together our seasonal rituals and the things that we want to carry through with the parts that we aren't ready to give up yet. And yeah, there'll be parts that are easy to let go of, and there'll be parts that you want to hold on to. You don't have to give up everything. It doesn't have to be all or nothing or all completely one way or one theme. I'm absolutely loving the blend of everybody's creativity coming together with our mismatch of crafts and interests and everything weave together. That's what's important for me. And I think that that's just a beautiful way to do our festivities together. It brings us closer. That's my goal and through this magical mothering journey, it's about unleashing all of the conditioning and the patterns that hold us down into into practices that don't align. Letting that go and sometimes that comes with grief of letting go of things and sometimes that comes with relief of being able to live more in alignment with your favorite self, of who it is that makes you feel lit up and thriving. Being able to live in that moment of connection to yourself is going to open you up to being connected with your family.