Reflections at Equinox
I have an image of the wheel of the year on my dining room wall. It is, truthfully, a little smudged from all the times the kids have touched it to locate where in the year we currently are. This, I think, is what it means to practice a nature based faith in the Anthropocene. Climate controlled environments. Supermarkets that offer us every imaginable food every season on the year. Each inch of open space (in New Jersey at least) snatched up by corporations or local government to be “developed” or “improved.” It requires reflection to locate yourself in a season sometimes!
The ubiquity of American holidays can also be a challenge to those trying to stay in sync with the wheel of the year and the eight nature based holidays (solstices, equinoxes and cross quarter days). Most American holidays line up with pagan ones (or are, in fact, rebrands of pagan holidays). But the one that sticks out like a sore thumb is Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving has never been my holiday. For starters, it’s really a meat-centric holiday and I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 18. For nearly a decade and a half, I schlepped my vegetarian dinner over to a meat centered Thanksgiving but schlepping gets old and extra tedious as your kids get older and eat more. So I’ve taken to doing Thanksgiving dinner at home but truth be told, though we make something special, a menu we plan together, it really doesn’t link up with American Thanksgiving.
I don’t see myself reflected anywhere in the Thanksgiving story. Two narratives seem to be the touchstones of American Thanksgiving. Personally, I am eager to put both of them to bed as I feel a need for something more authentic and fulfilling.
Thanksgiving touchstone number one, of course, is that bizarre colonizer-natives story we still trot out every year. That we still tell this story of the pilgrims and the Native Americans who sat down and had a lovely dinner is, to me, an admission of how as a nation, as a culture, we continue to struggle with the real details of our history. Okay, so there was a lovely dinner. There was also relocation, genocide, cultural erasure.
As I remind my kids often, especially at the times of the years reserved for patriotic feelings, America, like all nations, has a checkered history of amazing achievements and terrible wrongs. A nation is made up of people and I believe very few people are true saints or villains. Mostly we’re all mixed bags.
The American Thanksgiving story is too simplistic, too saccharine sweet in problematic ways. Making space for gratitude is great but American Thanksgiving is a little too concocted and out of tune. True it is cranberry season. But as every gardener knows, the final harvest of the summer harvest happens this time of year, in late September, not the end of November. The truth is we celebrate American Thanksgiving on a date chosen by FDR to encourage more holiday spending.
The “first Thanksgiving” is one story we re-enact on the FDR designated day in November. We also re-enact a tableau I’d call touchstone number two for American Thanksgiving: that Norman Rockwell painting of middle class white people sitting around a table laden with food, everyone all smiles.
At holiday time, we follow the pop culture script, adhering to someone else’s vision of how the holidays are supposed to look and feel. Americans comply with this vision though it stresses out record numbers of us. But of course, there is an alternative to following this script for those who find it unfulfilling — which brings me to Mabon.
Mabon is the second harvest festival of the wheel of the year. For this reason, it’s celebrated as pagan thanksgiving, a natural time for gratitude as we harvest the last bounty of the summer and the temperature begins to dip down. I don’t live in an agrarian society but I do tend a garden. It’s time to bring in the herbs. I will dry some like rosemary and lavender for use in herbal salts for warm winter baths. I will make others like thyme and mint into cough syrups for cold and flu season. I’ll be making my basil into hydrosols to try and hold on to some of that heavenly fresh basil smell through the winter.
As the autumn equinox, Mabon marks the point on the wheel of the year where we have equal day and night, same as at Ostara (which was Christianized as Easter). The equinoxes are a good time for thinking about balance — what being in balance looks like in life, what it requires, what it takes to get there.
Giving thanks. Seeking balance. Letting go. All three are themes of Mabon. We are balanced at the equinox but we are tipping into darkness. Daylight grows shorter. The temperature recedes. Trees lose their leaves. It’s an opportunity to think about what we might want to release or let go off. Trees shed their leaves to conserve their energy for the winter ahead. We can take a lesson from the trees and decide what to shed to conserve our energy for darker, colder days ahead.
Now that I’ve reached middle age, I find that I want holidays to be something different, something deeper than the standard pop culture definitions. When your kids are young, you’re sort of required to focus on the consumerist bells and whistles — Easter Bunny, Santa, presents, candy, all the stuff. But now my kids are at an age where holidays can be rooted in reverence, reflection, introspection, and sharing ideas. There’s still plenty of fun — food, treats, and laughs. But I like that the holidays can be an occasion for deep conversations. This Mabon over dinner and bonfire, we discussed what we were grateful for, what we needed to find balance, and what we were ready to let go of.
Secular holidays are a tricky thing. We want to feel something deep and meaningful but too often, we’re working off a script we don’t feel at home in or we’re chasing the material trappings of the holidays to try and get all the feels. Maybe that works, maybe it doesn’t.
I like reflecting on the wheel of the year, discussing it with my kids, celebrating the holidays as the wheel turns because it offers a framework for understanding our place in nature. It illustrates the cycle of life, of death, and of rebirth. It offers a chance to connect with something bigger, no sacred texts or personified deities required (unless that’s your thing).
In past years, I’ve done Friendsgivings as a fun riff on Thanksgiving. Those were enjoyable but this year, I’m craving something quieter. I’m looking for stillness and calm to sit back, observe, and reflect. A bonfire, a little feast, some caramel apples is plenty for this Thanksgiving. To everyone reading, a happy Mabon!
