I live in Southern California. Celebrating the Celtic calendar creates cognitive dissonance for me. As a shaman and a witch, I work to align myself with nature’s cycles, but those cycles, at least in my surroundings, don’t match up with the High Holy days. I’ve been toying for some time with shifting my approach, and now is as good a time as any.

Celebrating the Solstices and the Equinoxes still makes sense to me. They are, after all, very clear cycles; but they don’t match up with the beginning of the seasons here.  As it turns out, they’re not even the darkest and lightest day of the year. Likewise, I do see the thinning of the veils at the beginning of May and November, and it only makes sense to me to celebrate their counterparts at the feasts of Brid and Lugh. It’s the seasonal aspects inherent in the traditional celebrations that don’t work for me.

Right now, it’s bitterly cold and alternates between clear/crisp and damp. But that doesn’t really start until the end of December, and lasts until February-ish, when it shifts to a lot more rain. The rain goes until early May, generally speaking, and then we have gloomy fog until July, when it starts to heat up. The heat peaks in August and September, but doesn’t really start to get cool again until right around the end of October. It’s downright bipolar until December.

So the seasonal references should reflect our wheel, not the wheel of the Celts (or anyone else, really). This means that the meaning of what we have traditionally called Harvest and Fertility festivals is going to shift. It means, too, that the time of the Big Sun and the time of the Little Sun shift. The height of summer is more aptly celebrated at Lughnassadh, or even the Autumnal Equinox. That means that the depth of winter is more properly celebrated at Imbolc or the Vernal Equinox. We are only starting to move into the womb of the wheel at Winter Solstice. The Summer Solstice is more like the start of Spring here in the Coastal Southwest.

I’m going to take this year to really play with this idea, letting “they way we’ve always done it” fall by the wayside, and just listen to what Nature has to tell me. I’ll continue to celebrate the New Moon, because that’s not seasonally dependent. We’ll see what happens with everything else.