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Spring Equinox - March 20, 2012 and Easter - April 8, 2012
Easter, Ostara, Eostar, and the Spring Equinox are celebrated around the same time depending on the year. The main themes are fertility, new birth, growth, and the triumph of light over darkness since the day and night are equal lenghts for the first time since the Autumn Equinox. Celebrate balance, night and day are equal. Celebrate the life around you as it miraculously emerges from the previously frozen and barren ground. Celebrate the animals reappearing and the ambience of fertility in the natural world. This is also a time for beginning new endevors, projects, or ideas as well as planting a garden. The first flowers begin to appear and are welcome as a renewed gift from the God and Goddess. The time of darkness is over once again and Spring promises warmth, beauty, and food for all. Feasting and visiting with friends and family takes place as color returns to the world.
The word equinox is derived from the Latin words meaning “equal night.” The spring and fall equinoxes are the only dates with equal daylight and dark as the Sun crosses the celestial equator. At the equinoxes, the tilt of Earth relative to the Sun is zero, which means that Earth’s axis neither points toward nor away from the Sun.
Ostara was brought to the Celtic world by the Saxons and was not originally part of the Celtic year. It can be viewed as a time of courtship between the God and Goddess, which culminates in their joining at Beltaine.
Symbols: Eggs, equilateral crosses, butterflies, flowers, rabbits.
Food: Eggs and sweets. Try making some colorfully iced petit fours.
Colors for decoration: Ostara is one of the more colorful holidays unlike Yule and Candelmas which focus on somber colors. The colors of Ostara are mostly soft pastels, greens, blues, yellows, pinks, purples.
Decorations: Flowers, eggs, plants. Baskets filled with flowers and other spring time items.
Celebration activities: This is the best time of year to start your seedlings. If you grow an herb garden, start getting the soil ready for late spring plantings. Ccelebrate the new life that surrounds you in nature -- walk in park, lay in the grass, hike through a forest, dip your feet into a stream, pick flowers, enjoy the breeze on your face. Observe all the new life beginning around you such as plants, flowers, insects, birds, small animals.
Put an egg on your altar to symbolize fertility.
Perform a courtship dance with the God or Goddess whichever is the opposite gender as yourself.
Use a stick to gently tap the ground three times to help wake up Mother Earth, then repeat the process three more times for the magical 3 times 3 equation. |
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