Today the witchling went from being two-thirds to being three-quarters. Well, strictly, she’s been doing that for the last month, but, you know, play along. Nine months she is today, and we celebrated with pancakes, delayed from last (Shrove) Tuesday. Because I am crap with dairy products, we are waiting to give her milk and so forth until she is one, but I have discovered that oat milk, revolting though it may sound, is actually roughly akin to soya milk (apart from the hideous, hideous price tag – £1.60 or so). Oh. Hang on. I always forget – I am in a minority of, er, one in thinking that soya is an acceptable beverage, aren’t I? I’ve tried and tried to persuade Quercus that Earl Grey with soya is the drink of the gods, but thus far, I have failed. Anyhoo. I digress. So, oat milk in one hand, and newly-allowed-egg in t’other, we scoffed down rather more pancakes than one can shake a frying pan at, and the witchling evinced her delight at the proceedings by allowing me to feed her little morsels of pancake from my thumb, an activity reserved for those rare occasions when the food is sufficiently tempting as to overcome her desire to feed herself, by herself, without help from her bloody mama, and preferably without any sort of interaction with facecloths afterwards, thank you very much.

(As an aside, I can’t express my delight in life with the witchling. I really should post about it, come to think of it; I would hate her to think, should she read any of this wittering in the future, that I didn’t post because she wasn’t interesting or enjoyable or what-have-you: it’s largely that I’m busy enjoying myself with her, and thus don’t post! I also don’t want this to be one of those blogs where What Once Was becomes nappies, nappies, nappies – oh, and a few more nappies, if that makes sense.)

One of the things I really, really relish about being an adult with a household of my own is the ability to pick and choose traditions, no matter how bizarre, and to adapt the same for our own twisted purposes. Neither of us is remotely Christian – in fact, quite the opposite, if there is such a thing as the opposite of Christianity – but we do like a pancake, oh yes indeedy, just as we do like a Chrimbly tree. We’ve sort of evolved our own approach to these things.* We have Chrimbly puddings, for example, and the excellent dark solstice cake which graced our table for the first time this year will definitely be making a repeat appearance in future – I’ve been looking for Our Chrimbly Cake Recipe for yonks, but hadn’t found it until that baby came out of the oven. We also have a real Chrimbly tree, and we decorate it with things made anew each year (normally fircones, twig stars and orange slices; the jewel biscuits to which Turquoise Lisa introduced us will also be part of the repertoire from now on too!) Since having the witchling, I’ve been thinking a bit about which things we do, and why, and what we’ll tell her about them when she’s a bit older. I mentioned the concept of season tables and whatnot in my previous post – while I can’t ever see us having something that formal, I do like the idea of having a sort of pattern to the year, and punctuating that pattern with some sort of recognition of the time passing. Preferably an edible punctuation, naturally. Mostly, we do things like Samhain/Hallowe’en, shortest day/winter equinox/Candlemass/St. Lucy’s day, Yule/Chrimbly, Beltain/Midsummer etc. But now I realise we also do things like bonfire night, and the pancake thing. For me, most of it I just enjoy as a passing of the year, as a seasonal change, as a shift in the pattern we follow, though I am aware of the spiritual sides, particularly with the witchcraft/earth-religion-related things. What sort of calendar do most people follow? Do you do what we do? Do you have this and that, from this religion and that? Do you take note of any religious symbolism, or do you just eat the damn pancake, as it were?

*Not the least of which, of course, is the fact that Christmas = Chrimbly here. Or sometimes Crumphole. I don’t know why; blame it on my mother, whose love of buggering about with language is clearly indelibly present in the ol’ DNA.