Sunny Among Others

Damn like I do’t have enough to do. But I Loes me a challenge :)

graveyarddirt:

Every damn year I get really fucking down because I never manage to scratch the surface, let alone hand over a textual tome demystifying how I’ve managed to incorporate my ethnicity, childhood experiences and Eastern Orthodox practices into my version of witchcraft. And that shit’s V. IMPORTANT SHIT because it helps illustrate how I got to where I am today (as a person and as a witch).

(I mean, that’s the whole effing point of maintaining Graveyard Dirt, you know? To provide a totally unique example of how I’m doing it, by using the adventures, mental ruminations, disasters and personal epiphanies I’ve experienced that’ve shaped my beliefs, actions and goals.)

So, anyway…

There are so many goddamn Christmas-Midwinter-Yule traditions in this fucking house I don’t even know where the fuck to start. And it’s not all just Ukie shit that Italics gets bullied into taking part (heh!), there are little things - some stupid, some sentimental - that’ve taken shape in the thirteen Decembers we’ve spent together. (Like the Yuletide goose, which you guys should already be familiar with. <- See? I’m on a mothereffing roll this year! First the goose and now Sviata Vechera!)

Today I’m tackling Sviata Vechera (Holy Supper), probably one of the most beloved celebrations in the Ukrainian world. My version of the feast is twice removed from “the old country”; my grandparents were born and raised in Ukraine, but they actually met in Germany, and my mother was born in Germany, but raised in the United States (where I was born).

I’m two generations separated from THE REAL THING, but I like to think that what I do sort’ve bridges the gap between myself and my grandparents (once my mother found concrete proof we had Native American ancestry - my great-grandfather was a full-blooded Hunkpapa Lakhota who traveled with a wild west show to Europe, but he got deathly sick on the boat and refused to make the trip back home so he settled in Ukraine and married my great-grandmother - being Ukrainian became outlawed).

I mean, the shit I do isn’t one billion percent traditional, but it’s easily recognizable to any Ukie. And in all honesty? I’ve just peeled back the hella thin Christen veneer that was painted over practices so obviously pagan that to this fucking day we still arrive to church on Holy Saturday with baskets of phallic shaped bread for the priest to bless. (No, no, you did an AWESOME fucking job converting us, Orthodox Church, and we’re TOTALLY baking our cock bread to celebrate the resurrection of our lord and savior, Jesus Christ…snort.)

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