Celebrate Lughnasadh, a pagan summer harvest festival, with an earth-centered ritual. Enjoy the abundance of late summer and honor the ancestors.

Lughnasadh (pronounced “LOO-nuh-suh”) is an ancient harvest festival usually held around August 1st in the Northern Hemisphere. It marks the beginning of the harvest season, the shift from summer towards fall, and commemorates the move from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural one in Celtic mythology.

Honor the pagan festival of Imbolc with a simple ritual designed to release the heaviness of winter and invite in the healing fire of springtime.

Imbolc is a traditional Gaelic festival celebrated each year around February 1. It heralds early spring, and while many parts of the world are still very much covered in snow at this time, Imbolc celebrations honor the fire of life returning to the earth after a long winter.

Winter is a time of hibernation for many plants and animals, including humans. We may still be getting up and going to work, but we may find that we’re a little slower, a little more tired. We may lack the energy to start new projects or really get things moving until we start to feel that spring fire kindling within us again. Here is a ritual we can use to help tap into this thawing and igniting energy of the full Pink Moon of April.

March’s full moon is called the Worm Moon, likely referring to the movement under the earth that begins in the early spring in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s a time when the ground is melting, the frozen earth is beginning to give way, and the worms begin to wriggle and move beneath the ground.

In February we greet the full Snow Moon. It’s a name that comes from various sources, including the Naudowessie band of the Dakota tribe. Because February has typically been the month with the heaviest snowfall of the year, it became the month of the Snow Moon.

Part of the reason there are so many different religious holidays in December is because of the magic of the winter solstice. All over the world, people light candles and bonfires at this time of year, gathering, feasting, and staying up late. The winter solstice is a powerful time of darkness, and darkness is often the place where magic happens.

Trauma doesn’t respond to conventional ways of healing, so we need our unconventional grimoires. We cannot plan out and micromanage our healing, but we can cast a spell.