Celebrating #Mabon And #HobbitDay

Mabon - more commonly refered to as the Autumn Equinox - was last week.  In fact, the exact date and time of the astronomical event known as the Autumn Equinox took place at 8:21pm UK time on September 22nd 2021.  But for simplicity's sake I always celebrate the Equinox on September 22nd anyhow, even though it can fall any day between September 20th and September 23rd (in rare years even as early as September 19th).  I'm going to go ahead and assume I don't need to explain what this particular holiday is, since most people know of the existance of the Equinox and its link to harvest time, and - depending on your beliefs - the start or middle of Autumn.

Anyway, as usual my celebrations were pretty quiet, with a private meditation-based ritual and a themed meal being the main things I did to celebrate.  I'm nowhere near as good as I used to be at meditating regularly, and don't do it daily any more (despite frequent attempts to restart that habit) but I make more effort for special dates.  Even then there have been times I've failed to do it, but I do mostly at least do a meditation ritual for the holidays I acknowledge (or try to acknowledge) even if I do little or nothing else to celebrate them.

 

I'm also doing something that could be considered a month long Mabon celebration in the form of a "Small Things September" challenge I'm participating in, since gratitude is a big part of Mabon, and being grateful for those small things that give me pleasure and a feeling of hygge is the whole point of that challenge, so I'm counting it as part of my Mabon celebrations.  I'll tell you more about that on Friday.

 

For those who might be curious: my meal was a vegan adaptation of a recipe my Mam mentioned remembering doing us for Halloween several years ago - way back before I stopped eating meat, so it's got to be at least close to 15 years ago now, if not further back than that.  It was called a "Hubble-Bubble Cassarole" and involved sausages, bacon, mushrooms, onions, and some seasonings we couldn't remember (though when I looked up the recipe it said garlic and paprika) cooked with tinned tomatoes and baked beans.  So I veganized it by leaving out the sausages and bacon.  I also decided to use sage as the seasoning (even though I'd looked up what it was meant to be) since sage is a herb associated with Mabon.  The actual recipe also calls for the addition of sugar and worcestershire sauce, but I decided not to add sugar to my version, and didn't have any vegan worcestershire sauce (normally I'd use soi sauce in place of that, but decided not to bother in this case).  Anyway, then I served it over baked potato.  I also had some grapes as a dessert, which are a fruit associated with Mabon.  Apples would have been a better dessert choice, but I neglected to add those to the shopping list, so grapes had to do.  The potatoes and onions that were involved in my meal are also foods associated with Mabon - in case you're interested.

 

Artemis and Mollie got to have some of the sage and grapes as part of their food that day too, which both of them were extremely pleased about - I think they were especially glad they got to share my grapes.

 

September 22nd was Hobbit Day too.  So I celebrated that with some cake and tea in the afternoon - just because I could.  For those who like to know these things: the cake was some of the lemon cupcakes I had left from the ones I'd made a few days before, and the tea was peppermint tea.