Thursday Thirteen

Thought this week I'd do a list with 13 things about Ostara
March 21 -- Ostara -- Spring or The Vernal Equinox
Also known as: Lady Day or Alban Eiler (Druidic)

1. Traditional Foods: Leafy green vegetables, Dairy foods, Nuts such as Pumpkin, Sunflower and Pine. Flower Dishes and Sprouts.

2. Incense: Jasmine, Rose, Strawberry, Floral of any type.

3. Sacred Gemstone: Jasper

4. Herbs and Flowers: Daffodil, Jonquils, Woodruff, Violet, Gorse, Olive, Peony, Iris, Narcissus and all spring flowers.

5. Special Activities: Planting seeds or starting a Magickal Herb Garden

6. As Spring reaches its midpoint, night and day stand in perfect balance, with light on the increase. The young Sun God now celebrates a hierogram (sacred marriage) with the young Maiden Goddess, who conceives. In nine months, she will again become the Great Mother. It is a time of great fertility, new growth, and newborn animals.

7. The next full moon (a time of increased births) is called the Ostara and is sacred to Eostre the Saxon Lunar Goddess of fertility (from whence we get the word estrogen, whose two symbols were the egg and the rabbit.

8. The Christian religion adopted these emblems for Easter which is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox

9. The theme of the conception of the Goddess was adapted as the Feast of the Annunciation, occurring on the alternative fixed calendar date of March 25 Old Lady Day, the earlier date of the equinox. Lady Day may also refer to other goddesses (such as Venus and Aphrodite), many of whom have festivals celebrated at this time.

10.To celebrate Ostara some groups create special dishes made of flowers, such as stuffed nasturtiums or carnation cupcakes.

11. Activities appropriate to celebrate the day include those listed above, as well as randomly collecting wildflowers on a walk through the woods, or buying a mixed bouquet from a florist. The flowers you choose will often reveal your inner thoughts and emotions, and their meanings to you can be divined through books, pendulum, and your intuition.

12. Ritual cleaning is often done, though usually in the secular vein today. It seems people are driven by the need to throw open the windows to our homes and force out all the stale, winter air. Many of us clean the house from top to bottom; sweeping every nook and cranny from ceiling to floor; cleaning out cabinets and drawers, and scrubbing them, too. Often, many choose this time of year to change the liners in drawers, or to put away the winter bedding in favor of the lighter-weight summer linen. Heavy winter clothes are washed, folded, and put away and the lighter weight spring and summer clothes find their way into our closets.

13. This same mundane ritual of household cleaning can be applied to our inner selves, as well. Use Ostara to clean out all the mental cobwebs and to throw away all the old, negative modes of thought. Throw open the doors to your mind, heart, and soul and let the gentle breezes of Ostara breathe new hope and the vigor of youth into

This list was adapted from Wicca.com