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| Family reunions and holidays can be tough, but if you come from one of those families where you bring a dish to a celebration, you can use this bit of magic to ease the holiday tension.
Choose a dish where you spend time mixing, stirring, or sifting. As you do so, conjure your hopes for a peaceful family gathering. Have a home video with happy memories or some cheerful music playing while you create. If all your memories are just too harsh, watch something that makes you laugh while you cook. Take the happiness you're feeling and watch it streaming from you into what you're cooking. Chant as you cook: Over and in, I stir love in. Up and out, the love bakes throughout. The food will take the love you're putting into it, and anyone who consumes it will feel that love and laughter that you've put in. Holiday lore: The Yule season is a festival of lights and a solar festival, and it is celebrated by fire in the form of the Yule log - a log decorated with fir needles, yew needles, birch branches, holly sprigs, and trailing vines of ivy. Back porches are stacked with firewood for burning, and the air is scented with pine and wood smoke. When the Yule log has burned out, save a piece for use as a pwerful amulet or protection through the new year. Now is a good time to light your oven for baking bread and confections to serve around a decorated table; sweets have an ancient history. They are made and eaten to ensure that one would have "sweetness" in the coming year. Along these lines, mistletoe hangs over doorways to ensure a year of love. Kissing under the mistletoe is a tradition that comes down from the Druids, who considered the plant sacred. They gathered mistletoe from the high branches of sacred oak with golden sickles. It is no coincidence that Christians chose this month to celebrate the birth of their savior Jesus. Now is the time when the waxing Sun overcomes the waning Sun, and says finally begin to grow longer again. In some Pagan traditions, this struggle is symbolized by the Oak King overcoming the Holly King - that is, rebirth once again triumphing over death. And so the holly tree has come to be seen as a symbol of the season. It is used in many Yuletide decorations. For instance, wreaths are made of holly, the circle of which symbolized the wheel of the year - and the completed cycle. (Yule means "wheel" in old Anglo-Saxon.) |
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