Check out all the wonderful animal photos at National Geographic.com

Groundhog day is Candlemas in the old European Calendar. This is the day that Christmas or Yule decorations officially come down. Here is the full verse:

If Candlemas day be fair and bright,

Winter will have another flight.

If Candlemas day be clouds and rain,

Winter is gone, and will not come again.

~ E. Holden

The US tradition honors the groundhog, or marmot, as the local weather prognosticator. Other regions honored the fox, the robin and a host of other animals. The animal chosen is not important, nor is the forecast supposed to relate to a whole country, but is said to describe a local microclimate phenomenon. Whatever, I ask you all to wish for a cloudy day tomorrow, wherever you are, so that no beast can see his shadow. We don’t want another repeat of last year!

The American Ground Hog: Click here to visit Punxatawney Phil’s official site.

For some of the science behind the tradition, yes, there is a wee bit of science, see the Farmer’s Almanac article.

Most importantly, watch Groundhog Day again.

Ingredients
Country style pork ribs 3 lbs
(it doesn’t matter whether they are boneless or not and feel free to use more or less than this amount)
Prepared pico de gallo or fresh salsa, one 16 oz container
crockpot

Yes, you read it right, you only need 2 ingredients. You can complicate this by chopping onion, garlic, tomatoes and cilantro yourself but the pico de gallo in your grocery’s produce section already has those in it.

Place pork in the bottom of the crockpot, pico de gallo on top, cook for at least 8 hours. Remove bones and shred the chunks with two forks before serving.

You can cook it a day ahead of time, refrigerate the cooker and skim the fat if you are into that sort of thing. I serve it hot and as is.

For a party, you could serve it with rice or tortillas and melt grated cheese on top or just serve it in bowls with salad and bread or chips.

Bon appetit!

At the Solstice, the Sun enters the part of the space-time continuum belonging to Capricorn. This is the official first day of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere. The word Solstice is derived from the Latin sol, or “Sun,” and stitium, or “stoppage.” At the Solstice, the Sun appears to both rise and set at the same spot on the horizon. On or around June 21, the Summer Solstice, the North Pole is tilted most directly Sunward. Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere experience this as the longest day and shortest night of the year. On or around December 21, the Winter Solstice, the North Pole is pointed away from the Sun giving us in the Northern Hemisphere, our shortest day and longest night. It is this tilting of the Earth’s rotational axis that gives us our seasons. If you want more information on how this works, just ask and I can recommend some articles and books that explain it really well. I don’t know about you, but to me, the important part of this is that from here on out, we get a few minutes more of daylight each day, until the Summer Solstice, that is.

Symbols of Winter:

snow, bare-branched trees, icicles, yule log, Santa Claus, elves, a creche, etc.

Foods of Winter:

Mulled cider, brandy, eggnog, Julekake, fruitcake, nuts, yams, satsumas, candy canes and fudge.

Check out this link: spices that increase circulation.

Colors of Winter:

blue, white, silver, red and green.

Stones of Winter:

Capricorn is onyx, hematite and garnet. Aquarius is pietersite, malachite and amethyst. Pisces is aquamarine, and turquoise and jade.

Activities of Winter:

Skiing and snowshoeing, hanging up lights and decorations, Holiday celebrations, watching sappy movies and shoveling snow.

Apparently, the streets of Taiwan are considerably warmer than my Seattle living room because the poor girl is freezing. She’ll get on the couch and put her feet against me for warmth and I can feel how cold they are through my jeans. I downloaded a few patterns for sweaters, but didn’t want to invest the time knitting it if she wouldn’t tolerate wearing it. Fred Meyer obliged by having this cute hoody on sale for 50% off. So I brought it home and popped it on her. Rob was a good brother and didn’t laugh at her or anything rude like that. She got right down to the urgent business of chewing off the cord lock on the waist tie and then promptly curled up for a nap.  I guess I am knitting dog sweaters this winter.  Scott asked me if I would make Robbie one too but frankly I can’t think of any circumstances where he would be cold. He is the snow-dog, after all -you can see the proof  in this post if you missed it last winter!

Celebrate the harvest, the beauty of Autumn, celebrate gratitude!

What did you learn in grade-school? I learned that Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims , who wore tall hats, leggings and big gold buckles on their shoes. They were starving when they landed at Plymouth Rock and the local “Indians”  taught them to place a dead fish into the ground with each corn seed that they intended to grow. The Pilgrims were so grateful that they invited the Indians to a harvest feast in late November and served turkey and pumpkin pie with a horn-of-plenty on their table as a center-piece.

Obviously, every American school-teacher of the era taught something similar because the History.com website dispels all of these myths except the fish planting-technique. They go into a good amount of detail so I’ll refrain from paraphrasing and just recommend that you click the link. What did you learn about Thanksgiving?

Harvest Festivals are traditional to every cultural group and take many forms.  What they all have in common is the concept of gratitude to nature or to one’s gods who provided the harvest, the food that would sustain the clan or tribe until the next harvest.  This link to the BBC Harvest Festival site will give you some ideas that you may wish to incorporate into your own Thanksgiving celebration.

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade heralds the beginning of the Christmas shopping season which begins the day after Thanksgiving is known as Black Friday. Wiki says “the term “Black Friday” originated in Philadelphia in reference to the heavy traffic on that day. More recently, merchants and the media have used it instead to refer to the beginning of the period in which retailers go from being in the red (i.e., posting a loss on the books) to being in the black (i.e., turning a profit).” The US also has an anti-Thanksgiving component as many Native Americans and supporters spend a ‘Day of National Mourning’ at Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts as they have each year on Thanksgiving Day since 1970. Here is a wickedly funny Reenactment of the First Thanksgiving by a group of kids, their writer, film-crew and a heck of a director. It reminded me of the second Addams Family movie.

Links:

About.com article about the cornucopia

Wikipedia Thanksgiving link

History Channel Thanksgiving link

BBC Harvest Festival link

If you were ever a Kepler student, you probably remember me from Symposium. I was part of the Leo group, the sealions. I am currently an MA student at U. Wales, Trinity St. David and working on my research project for the term. I am interested in the responses of any Kepler College students, whether you completed a degree, or took only one class.

Graduation!

Query: Why would students entering a degree program choose astrology as a major, and why would those same students choose to study astrology within an academic degree program rather than to study practical astrology in a group with a single teacher or in a non-degree-granting program?
 

Your participation is confidential, responses will be stored and tabulated without any contact information attached. If you have any questions or would like to participate in an interview, email or call me at 206-459-6963. If you know any other Kepler students, please pass this along to them. >^..^< Thanks!

I am amazed at the way memory works, or doesn’t as the case may be. I had a demonstration of how mine works today while I was driving to Weaving Works to pick up a part for my loom. A tune started up on the radio and I quickly recognized the Sorcerer’s Apprentice  but then couldn’t remember who the composer was. I was pretty annoyed with myself since this is a pretty distinctive piece of music and an image of a Cardassian from Deep Space 9 kind of appeared in my head. Well, the first thing I thought was ‘no, it isn’t Alaimo‘, the actors name, but then thought, ‘Ah, the character is Gul Ducat and the composer, Paul Dukas.’

I gave thanks to Hermes and just sat amazed at how this stuff all just floats around on the old internal hard drive and surfaces when there is a connection to be made to some other piece of information, like the way I got an image that was actually a representation of sound, whew. I’ve spent the evening watching this clip from Fantasia and chuckling to myself about a Cardassian composing it. >^..^<