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In the early days of Paganistan, M and N were everyone's favorite couple. Even when the Witch Wars burned through and people weren't talking to people, everybody still loved them.

They were witches, Alexandrians, both fine-looking folks. Somehow, even that never created any hard feelings, they were just so much in love with one another. It was hard to think of them separately, so naturally did they fit together. A friend, in conversation, once referred to them as lovers, then corrected herself.

“You guys are so much in love, I keep forgetting that you're married,” she laughed, and we all joined in, because it was so true.

When M died, it came as a shock to us all. For one thing, she wasn't very old. For another, well...she was just so vital. She'd known that she was sick, of course, but hadn't wanted to darken her last days by spreading the knowledge around. N, of course, was with her to the end. It seemed utterly fitting that she should have died on Valentine's Day.

She hadn't been out to her folks; in those days, few of us were. The pagan community showed up en masse—no pun intended—for her funeral. There probably hadn't been that many witches in a church since the Burning Times. In the eulogy, the priest kept talking about what a good Christian she'd been.

February is a windy, cold month in Minnesota. A stiff, bitter breeze blew in off the prairie as we stood in the cemetery. Still—M would have loved it—there was something playful, even carnivalesque, about that graveside service. Someone, incredibly, had brought along a bouquet of helium balloons: bright colors against the stark, white snowscape. After the prayers, they released them. Watching those balloons soar up and away into they sky was heartbreaking, the perfect metaphor. As they flew away, the tears flowed.

Afterward, the pagans gathered over food and drink for our own remembrance. N looked devastated.

Sorrow had made me bitter. The priest's words still rankled; I complained about them to a friend.

But he was wiser than I.

Seriously? Chips and brats? That's your Yule feast?

When I first blew into Paganistan nigh on 40 years ago, it took me a while to hook up with other pagans—things took longer in those pre-internet days—and when I finally did, it took some time to build up enough trust to start getting invited to things.

So when I finally got asked to a local coven's Yule ritual, believe me, I was stoked.

I sweated what to bring for the Yule feast. At the time, I was still living in the dorms and didn't have access to a kitchen. Finally I settled on fruitcake.

I know, I know. Me, I like fruitcake.

(I once attended a holiday party to which someone had brought a fruitcake. "I can't stand fruitcake," said the Christians, shrinking away with distaste. "Oh, I just love fruitcake," said the Jews and pagans, gathering around.)

This particular fruitcake I had bought at the local more-holistic-than-thou old hippie bakery (gods: it was even called “People's Company Bakery”; now long gone, of course) and, as fruitcakes go, was really pretty righteous: 100% whole wheat (of course), honey-sweetened (of course), chock-full of chunks of wonderful exotic dried fruits like mango and pineapple. I conscientiously irrigated it with brandy for a week or two before the ritual. By the time Midwinter's Eve rolled around, it was smelling pretty damned good.

Oddly, I don't remember anything at all about the ritual itself. What I do recall was standing dismayed at the Yule board afterward in a state of profound culture shock. Brats and bags of chips. This you call Yule?

The situation took me a while to suss. Was it, I wondered at first, a class issue: middle and working class values in collision, maybe? (Such are the dangers of a college education.)

For years, back when the local pagan community was a little less diffuse than it is these days, and folks mostly knew one another—not that that meant that we all got along, mind you—my friend Dan around the corner and his family used to hold the annual community-wide Mother Night Vigil. Pagans being pagans, of course, half of us used to refer to it as the “Viggle.”

(This was not just an in-joke, by the way; this was deep in-group humor—self-mockery, even. It satirized pagans who didn't know how to pronounce things correctly because they'd learned most of what they knew from books. Back in those days, that meant most of us.)

At sunset on Midwinter's Eve, they'd throw open the doors. All night long, the Viggle lasted, honoring the Longest Night. It ended with a sunrise breakfast. Covened folks with other obligations would come and go; the uncovened often stayed all night. In a community not known for community institutions, the Yule Eve Viggle was a community institution.

Dan's house being only a couple of blocks away from mine, I would generally walk over and drop in after our Mother Night ritual and feast. The house would be full of people, in varying states of intoxication, but all festive. There was always a massive fire roaring on the hearth, and tables and tables and tables of food. (“Meats and sweets,” my friend Ricky Bjugan always used to say.) The kids would be running around in a state of terminal excitement: they got to open their presents at midnight.

When Dan moved out of town, Thraicie and Jane over at our neighborhood witch store, The Eye, inherited the Viggle, and kept it going for (I believe it was) all of thirteen years.

These days, there's no community-wide Solstice Eve Viggle here in Paganistan any more; not that I know of, anyway. But you know pagans. The all-night Viggle, probably the world's oldest Yule ritual, will always eventually crop up again, because...well, you know what they say.

There was once a city that was governed by a mayor and a city council.

Now, at this time, certain citizens had decided that they wanted free ice cream for breakfast every day, so they arranged a rally in a park and invited the mayor and the city council to attend.

“FREE ice CREAM! FREE ice CREAM! EV-ryday for BREAKfast! FREE ice CREAM!”  they chanted.

The city council stood before the crowd.

“We hereby vow that, from this day forward, you will all have as much free ice cream as you want for breakfast every day!” they told the people, who cheered and made much of them.

But one by one, in the days that followed, the city council were all forsworn.

“Well, I didn't really mean ice cream....” said one.

“Well, what I thought they meant was that we'd all have eggs and toast for breakfast every day,” said another.

“Who, me? No, I didn't say that,” said yet another.

The mayor, though, told the people: “No, you can't have free ice cream for breakfast every day.”

The mayor was jeered and booed, and derided as retrogressive, and a false liberal.

You'll be hearing in the media that on Election Day the voters of Minneapolis—Pagantown, USA—decided not to “defund” the police after all.

Let me tell you what really happened.

Yes, we voted (by a substantial margin) to reform rather than to replace the MPD. Yes we voted to reelect our cute-but-ineffectual mayor, Jacob “Prettyboy” Frey. (Like “fry,” not like the god's name.) Yes, we voted to restructure our city government to dis-empower City Council and re-empower the Mayor.

But make no mistake: we did not do this because our police department doesn't need drastic revision, or because our prettyboy mayor has done a good job. He hasn't, and they do.

Since the 1920s, the City of Lakes has been governed by what's known as a “weak mayoral” system. Essentially, City Council runs the show, and the mayor is just a (in this case, good-looking) figurehead.

And see what came of it: the senseless death of George Floyd, and all the anger and mayhem that followed.

A "weak mayor" system might be all well and good if and when you have a functional City Council. Unfortunately, for the last four years, we've had a City Council composed, for the most part, of dithering, cowardly incompetents who can't agree what to do, and invariably kowtow to the loudest and angriest voices. For years, our city government has been like a dysfunctional coven in which the high priest (or high priestess) has no power, but the squabbling coven can't manage to come to agreement about anything.

This wasn't a vote for overweening policing, or for a do-nothing mayor. This was a vote against City Council.

It's my first time working as an election judge for the city of Minneapolis. (Election Day: now there's a Samhain ritual for you.) Through the course of the day, I see lots of familiar pagan faces at the poll.

This, of course, is only to be expected: being the opinionated people that we are, pagans are much given to voting. This, moreover, is the pagan neighborhood, and me a longtime resident thereof.

I'm working the front door, greeting people and directing them, when a man that I don't know strides in, sporting a jaunty pentagram. It's always gratifying to be reminded that, no, I don't in fact know every pagan that lives in south Minneapolis.

“Blessed be,” I say.

Over the covid mask, he quirks an eyebrow.

“We are everywhere,” he intones.

“Everywhere,” I echo, and point him toward the sign-in table.

Lady Moon, Lady Moon

Lady Moon, Lady Moon,

shining so bright:

where are the little stars

hiding tonight?

Ask the old owl

that lives in the tree.

Who's that behind you?