Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving - Mabon Festival, is a Germanic and Celtic festival, but is also celebrated in Scandinavia and other Nordic countries.

Thanksgiving - autumn sacrifice festival - equinox - threshold festival.

For the Germanic peoples, the Thanksgiving festival lasted three days from September 21st to 23rd. They gave a big feast and drank mead. The gods were thanked for the harvest. They left a bunch of grain in the field so that Odin's horse Sleipnir also had something to eat. A wreath was woven from the last cut of grain. The last apple was also left hanging on the tree as a sacrifice.

Sometimes a harvest fire was lit for this purpose and sometimes it was customary to throw a small fruit offering, grains and other sheaves into the fire. At the Thanksgiving festival, people thanked the gods for the gifts of nature, although the celebrations could also get very extravagant. We thank the gods for the harvest and at the same time we say goodbye to summer.

Thanksgiving is also known as the threshold festival because they balance day and night for the same length of time. If we transfer the day to the annual cycle, this festival corresponds to the sunset, the evening glow and twilight. The day thus becomes a threshold state between day and night. The beauty of the evening sun, the intense colors of the sunset, are the field of tension between the receding light and the slowly approaching night, the threshold, the door to the other world and often very emotional.

Customs and traditions differ or sometimes overlap in different cultures. Samhain and the Autumn Sacrifice Festival are of pagan origin, partly persecuted by the Christian church, reinterpreted or used/abused for their purposes. From the 3rd century onwards, Christians also celebrated Thanksgiving with modified and reinterpreted customs. In Germany, the Thanksgiving holiday was set for the first Sunday in October.

We know the origin and meaning of the celebration and always celebrate Thanksgiving Day in the autumn on the equinox on September 23rd, when the nights become longer than the day and the darkness increasingly “gains the upper hand”!

It is up to us to cultivate the old customs again in the original tradition....

Yule Festival / Yule Celebration

Yule time, Christmas, rough nights, Wodan's wild hunt.

We refer to these as the 12 holy nights. The word "Weih" comes from the Old High German "wîh" and means something like holy / sanctuary.

The Rough Nights begin on the night of December 25th at midnight!
The Rough Nights end on January 5th at midnight.
Each of the Rough Nights represents a month in the coming year and runs from midnight to midnight.
The solar calendar and the lunar calendar differ by 12 days. The lunar calendar lacks “12 days and 12 nights”, which are known as Rough Nights.