The 7th Day of Yuletide
Omen Days
Mistletoe
Mistletoe Flower Essence
Omen Days
December 26th begins the 12 Omen Days. This is a practice about augury, oracle, and omens using the 12 days following Christmas to learn something about what is to come in the 12 coming months. These 12 days are ‘intercalary’ days and are used to create space in a calendar that doesn’t always line up to the actual ways of Sun and Moon and Earth. Leap year’s extra day is another example of an intercalary day. “Well, in Brittany and in Wales, the Twelve Days of Christmas, which mark the intercalary days of the year, are called ‘the Omen Days,’ and they have a special purpose. ‘Intercalary days’ are really the days left over from reckoning up the solar year and, in calendars throughout the world and at different times, they are special because they are considered to be ‘the days out of time.’ It is in this interval between the ordinary count of days that gods are born or conceived in many different mythologies, including the Irish one, where Oengus Og, Young Angus, is conceived, grown and born at Brúg na Boinne within this time, all in one day, by the magical workings of the Dagda.” from Caitlin Matthews, you can find her full post here.
Each day from December 26th through January 6th represent a month of year with 12/26 being January, and 1/6 being December.
It’s the perfect time of year to practice a daily Portent Walk to look for signs and symbols of what will come in each month. I love this ancestral connection. For me it lands much more fully and resonantly that the Mayan Day Out of Time in July. I love the idea but somehow I’ve really never felt the pull to those traditions.
The way I will practice The Omen Days are like this:
Each day I will pull a card for that month. It’s possible that I will pull more than one. I will lay that card on my altar and then step outside for my Portent Walk.
I will walk the same route each day and it’s likely that I will choose one of two—a bike ride to my father’s house or a walk around the shoreline here. I will turn my phone on Do Not Disturb and open the Notes on it so that I can record my thoughts and things I see as I walk. The walk might be 15 minutes. Probably no more.
Upon returning home I will enter the card info and my notes into my journal and allow the words to sit and percolate. At some point I will create a blog post around them and schedule the posts to drop on the first of each month as a reminded to myself and also as an offering to anyone interested in following along to see what the portents have to offer you.
I’ve only this year learned about the Omen Day and am excited to find them part of my annual Yuletide Practice.
Note: I really prefer the term Medicine Walk but am still coming to terms with how this particular term used to describe my ancestral mothers from Wales and Ireland—Medicine Healers—is one that has now become appropriative. So, Portent Walk it is.
Mistletoe Flower Essence
Excellent essence for everyone alive in 2020! Mistletoe is supportive for those going through huge changes in their lives. It encourages transformation. Mistletoe is helpful in bringing sexual balance and also gives the strength to cope with crisis situations and overcome obstacles such a overwhelming grief or serious illness.
Mistletoe
When I was a kid I loved the idea of being kissed beneath the mistletoe. The idea that a boy might like me enough to steal a kiss was tantalizing! As a woman the idea that there is man romantic enough to love this as much as I do is just as tantalizing.
Little did I know, back in those days, that the stolen kiss was a Victorian-approved upgrade to an ancient fertility rite.
Mistletoe is known to be most sacred to the Druids of the ancient British Isles. Pliny the Elder wrote about them and a ceremony involving gathering mistletoe, sacrificing two white bulls, and fertility magic
If you look at mistletoe, the way it grows, the way it looks when mature, there a few items of note: it grows high in trees, not from soil but rooted into the tree itself; it’s leaves are long ovals and dark, rich green; it’s berries are viscous and white (and poisonous, so don’t eat them).
As the Light is reborn out of the darkness, and the mythologies tell us of Oak Kings and Holly Kings and the Great Mother or Lady, we can see the Holly as the drops of menstrual blood of a fertile, fecund woman, and the Mistletoe berries as the clots of semen that inseminate the fertile Lady (Earth) to bring the birth of the Divine Child (Sun). The mistletoe is most Sacred when it grows from the branches of the Oak tree, a hard, long growing tree that represents the king who regains the crown each Winter Solstice, only to look it again at Midsummer.
