December Newsletter
Welcome to this bumper December Edition of the Foxfire Learning Newsletter!
The festive season has arrived, along with my cheesy logo additions! Whether you're a grinch (like me!) or Christmas-mad, I hope this newsletter offers you some solace in these darker days as we rapidly approach the shortest day - the Winter Solstice, on the 21st.
In this month's newsletter you will find:
Some musings about Roman and Gregorian calendars + the Pagan Wheel of the Year.
A book list for anyone looking for last minute Christmas gifts for Eco Warriors.
Just to give you a heads up, January's newsletter will be out around the 16th so if you read no further than this paragraph, have a very merry festive season and joyful new year's eve!
The Wheel of the Year
Many of us will consider December to be the last month of the year with the 31st marking New Years eve. However, the month following December wasn't always January....intrigued? Then please read on!
The 12-month calendar as we know it was widely adopted in 1582 when Pope Gregory XIII took the rather extreme decision of adding 10 days to its predecessor - the Roman calendar - to ensure that Easter would fall in the Spring months of March or April each year. The Roman calendar was originally determined by the cycles of the moon and the seasons of the agricultural year. This was a lunar year of 354 days but, because of the Roman superstition about even numbers, an additional day was added to make it 355 days long. The 10 months were named Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December, some names you'll recognise from today's 12 month calendar.
The Moon completes 12 full cycles of its phases in about 354 days – which is 11 days short of a Gregorian calendar year. Every two and a half years or so the difference adds up to an extra, 13th full moon occurring during the year and this relatively rare occurrence is sometimes referred to as a ‘blue moon’. Many indigenous calendars still use the moon to mark the passing of time, and the names of each month's full moon are heavily influenced by the agricultural seasons e.g. September's harvest moon.
Why am I telling you all of this? Well, here in the U.K we also have a calendar to which we can look to for a more seasonal and nature-based way of marking the passage of time - the Wheel of the Year, an historic Pagan and Neopagan calendar. This intuitive calendar looks to the skies to help us organise our year - from the solstices (longest and shortest days) to the equinoxes (the days when in the Northern hemisphere we see equal daylight and darkness), accompanied by festivals such as Yule to mark important points in the year which often correspond to the Christian calendar of festivities.
Beginning the year on the Spring (or Vernal) Equinox - 20th March - when we have equal daylight and darkness, feels pretty sensible to me. Many animals will also be emerging from their Winter dormancy around this time of year, signalled to awaken with the lighter, longer days. My Ecoliteracy for Educators course is rooted in the Wheel of the Year and will begin in the astronomical Spring on 20th March. If you're interested in hearing more about the course, please leave your email address with me by clicking here.
Books
If like me you love nothing more than cosying up with a good book on these long winter nights, I'm delighted to share with you some of my favourite titles from the world of Ecoliteracy, Ethnobotany and Ecology on my bookshop.org page here.
For anyone who's excited to enrol in my Ecoliteracy for Educators course, many of these books are also recommended reading so you can get a head start and perhaps ask Santa to gift you one or two titles ;) My nose is buried in the two below at the moment and they're impossible to put down! I highly recommend listening to the audiobook version of Braiding Sweetgrass as Robin Wall Kimmerer has the most soothing voice!
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this newsletter.
As ever, feel free to connect over on social media: @foxfirelearning or email: hello@foxfirelearning.com
For now, take care, don’t forget marvel at nature and see you next month!
With love and gratitude,
Charly
