By It’s Friday the 13th, which honestly is a day I love, and not only because I was born on one. I’ll be honest, most superstitions strike me as odd, but they tell us a lot about who we are, or who we came from. The roots of such superstitions can be illuminating, and they illustrate the times and lives of our ancestors.
I’ll be honest here, I often take a perverse sort of pleasure in purposely defying superstition. I dress in black on Friday the 13ths, today replete with skulls. I adore black cats, the only fear I have of ladders is of falling off of them.
This juxtaposition of Friday the 13th against the landslide down to Christmas is amusing, not the least because it invokes the whole Nightmare Before Christmas scenario. I’m that person who has Halloween decorations up (for some value of decoration, I don’t do much) year round. Right now the area in front of my TV is filled with pumpkins and witches and candles and some pine boughs…
I don’t do a lot of decorating, mostly because I hate taking it down and putting it away! One year I had Christmas lights up until nearly July. I save that urge for my mother’s house, where I will be going tomorrow to help her get the tree up and all that fun stuff.
I may go so far as to decorate a Yule log and burn it in my fire pit one night, we’ll see how I’m feeling about it, and if the rain lets up long enough to make it happen. Yule is pretty low key for me generally, as a Pagan, but I do want to recognize the rebirth of the sun and the return of the daylight as we pass the solstice and the days grow longer once more.
Christmas is a secular celebration for me, a time to spend with those that love me and to give gifts that remind them of my love for them.
But for today, I’ll just wrap my arms around the day and celebrate the overcoming of fear. I should probably also re-heat my breakfast, which has gone cold and drink some more coffee, because coffee is life!
Happy Friday, Readers! May the 13th shower you with good things!
Photo by Hannah Gibbs on Unsplash
Natalie J Case 