I'm walking past the neighborhood Scandinavian store—I live in Minneapolis, I can say that—when I stop dead in my tracks and my mouth falls open in disbelief.
The front window is filled with Midsummer stuff.
It's the 5th of April, the Equinox barely a fortnight gone. With Beltane nearly a moon away, already they're on to the Solstice?
Gods. If ever you've wondered what life in Pagandom-to-come will look like, welcome to the future.
Here in the North, we're all instinctive Sun-worshipers, and I mean that literally, not in the sneering way that the term is usually used in the secular press. We know where life comes from, and Midwinter and Midsummer are the twin hinges of our year.
Still, all things in their time. I'm all for sympathetic magic but, when it comes to Turning the Wheel, these things must be done delicately, or you hurt the spell.
Spring has come early to Minneapolis this year. We had our first 80 degree day Monday; the greening lawns are smokey-blue with "Siberian" squills. After the Winter at the end of the Year that Lasted for Three, people are out enjoying the warmth and the freedom.
Still, there's tension beneath the surface. Less than a year since the unrest and burnings that followed George Floyd's death at the hands of then-policeman Derek Chauvin, the trial has been an exercise in collective re-traumatization. Everyone hopes for a good outcome; everyone fears what a bad one could mean. Just coming 'round to the anniversary has been emotionally difficult.
So in some ways I'm grateful to Ingebretsen's Scandinavian Gifts for their crassly-premature display of Midsummer commercialism.
Frankly, it's rather refreshing to have something trivial to grouse about for a change.