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Some Asatruars have embraced the new pop culture holiday Wolfenoot, invented by a child as a holiday to honor canines, including dogs and wolves, and the people who love them. Some Asatruars have also started their own animal related holidays in reaction to Wolfenoot, including Kitten Nacht and Bearenfornia.

The 7 year old boy who invented Wolfenoot wanted a holiday in which the wolf spirit brings gifts to people who have been kind to dogs. It is celebrated by eating roast meats and a cake decorated to look like the full moon. It is celebrated on Nov. 23rd; the child stated that was the date when the Great Wolf died, according to the original post by the boy's mother, Jax Goss.

It is now Autumn in Japan, one of the most important seasons of the year.

There are four big events, starting with Shubun no Hi (Autumn Equinox), Tsukimi (Autumn Full Moon viewing), Kannazuki or Kanarizuki (Month Without or Month with Kami), and then Shuuki Taisai or Shuuki Reitaisai, (Autumn Grand Ceremony).

It is no surprise Autumn is an important time in Shinto and Japanese culture. As with many cultures and spiritualities around the world that are in tune with nature, Autumn is the all-important harvest season. A season to reap the bounties and give gratitude toward nature and the ancestors, deities, and other spirits to survive the cold upcoming Winter. In addition, it is a time of celebration, family, gathering, introspection, and reflection.

Visiting my mom in the old folk’s home is a lot like going on retreat. On retreat, the days can be long, as I sit, eat, and walk in a silence punctuated with my own restless thoughts. On my visits to my mom, we too sit, eat, and walk in a silence punctuated by her restless, repetitive questions (“Why did you come? Are you my guest? Why am I here?”) and my repetitive answers. Just as on retreat, there are moments of peace, stretches of boredom and periods of head-nodding semi-sleep, both of us upright in our chairs. For the days I’m there, nothing new is happening. Nothing much is being accomplished. It’s the same thing, over and over.

What's the first thing that you should do after you get home from a funeral?

You should make love.

And at any arval—burial feast (< “grave-ale”; cp. bridal, “bride-ale”)—while the rest of us are busy with the eating, drinking, and telling of stories, we should first send out some randy young couple with a cloak to make love on the grave.

That's the right way to do things, and a plague on all cowanish prudery.

Yes, Samhain is death, and the ancestors, but there's far, far more to it than that. There's Samhain in every Bealtaine, they say, Bealtaine in every Samhain.

Go out to the golden woods now, and listen. If you're lucky, you'll hear—as Summer dies—the snorting of the bucks. Here in the North, it's the Season of the Rut: Samhain rutting for Bealtaine fawning.

Though represented by its detractors as an incursion of paganism into Christianity, and presented as an integrally and intrinsically Christian phenomenon by its supporters, the truth about the 1993 Re-Imagining Conference and movement is that it was a product of a wider feminist awakening. The critique of patriarchal religions that emerged in the academy and in churches and synagogues in the late 1960s and early 1970s was part of the emerging feminist uprising. The feminist movement placed a question mark over all patriarchal texts and traditions, secular and religious, and as such was beholden to none.

In the spring of 1971, Roman Catholic Christian Mary Daly published “After the Death of God the Father” in the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal. She asserted that the God whose death was touted in the “Death of God” movement was an idol fashioned in the image of male power and authority. She called for “the becoming of new symbols” to express the new becoming of women.

I learned this blessing from Holocaust survivor, poet, priestess and all-around goddess, ruth weiss, who lives up north in what is truly an enchanted cottage in the forest. She brought this wisdom from Europe where it has been passed down to her from a lineage of wise women.  It is the simplest of spells which might be the secret to its extraordinary effectiveness. Go into your yard or garden and put both your hands into the earth and scoop up a handful of dirt. Hold the soil in both hands in front of you and repeat three times aloud:

Born in 1879, My paternal grandmother's life was as different from mine as possible. Prior to World War Two she had visited Italy almost annually. She loved it there and even sent money to help out the family of her gondolier—the equivalent of a taxi driver for the canals of Venice. When I was born, she asked that instead of being called "Granny," she be known as "Nonny," a variation on Nona, the Italian word for grandmother. She was very fond of me, her first and only grandchild until eight years later when the first of my siblings was born.

She wasn't a cookie baking, knitting "granny" sort. She was a forceful, energetic, woman whose hair remained a light brown with occasional gray roots between visits to the hairdresser, for all of her eighty years. She enjoyed my youthful company and we spent many afternoons playing card games or going to the various church fairs that occurred all during the summer months while I was growing up. She would give me money to buy pony rides and trinkets from the White Elephant table while she checked out what was being offered to the people attending the fairs.