Creating A Local Holiday Calendar Yourself

I encourage folks to change and adapt the holiday calendar of Paganism to fit the circumstances of the places where we live- choosing our own names and meanings for these holidays as necessary.

Why? Because in today’s age of adapting and drawing upon many different traditions in the quest for spiritual wholeness, we forget that all ‘ancient’ knowledge we draw from, was still originally developed in a local culture and ecosystem. And in that regard, the traditional Pagan Wheel of the Year doesn’t actually reflect any place except that of England, and specifically that of England in another time than ours.

But ours is supposed to be an Earth religion, and connectedness to our local seasonal cycles is essential. Our celebrations and spiritual practices should likewise reflect our own local ecologies and the land on which we livere, as well as our own ways of understanding… Not those of somewhere else- and some time else- entirely.

Before we get into how to adapt the Calendar to a local setting, however, it’s important to understand the different ways in which we can divide a landscape into smaller ecological units. Especially as most of us understand divisions from a political sense (countries, states, or provinces) or even a cultural one (local feasts, foods, agricultural practices, traditions, folklore, and so on). But few understand ecological boundaries.

t the largest level are Ecozones (like the Nearctic Ecozone). Next come Bioregions (such as the Great Plains). Next are Subregions (including areas such as the Central American Sierra Madre and Chiapas Highlands), which then become Ecoregions (such as the Cross Timbers Transitional Region). Microegional refers to anything within one’s immediately travelable area, within reasonable distance.

For our purposes, the most appropriate place to look is at the level of Ecoregion. There is some confusion, however, within the Pagan community, when it comes to Ecoregions vs Bioregions. And the vast majority of Pagans say ‘Bioregion’ when in reality they should be calling what they do ‘Ecoregional’- or even ‘Microregional’. However, if you’re traveling less than 200 miles from your home in a year, and you’re only studying within your state’s personal boundaries, then you’re not operating on a true Bioregional scale. What you’re doing is Ecoregional at best, but is most likely more properly Microregional.

Step One: Building The Backbone

So let’s start with the weather. I feel like many people will say that this sounds stupidly obvious. Obvious in the sense of “We have four seasons: winter, spring, summer, fall; and they occur at these times of the year. Done”! But I urge you to dig a little bit deeper than that.

Weather patterns are often way more nuanced and vary across different regions. To give you an example, almost every part of Arizona has something of a three-season cycle, but the specifics of the cycles are still very different depending on where you live. There is a city about two hours south of me called Tucson, and while they have the exact same seasons as Phoenix (where I live,) the specifics of our seasons are super different. Tucson is a lot less hot than us, they get way more rain, you can grow way more in the summer there, and their winters tend to be colder than ours. The only real difference between us is our elevation, and yet our wind patterns and rain patterns are quite different. The more local you can get, the better your results will be.

When examining weather patterns, here is a short list of things I recommend learning about:

• Temperature patterns: What are your hottest and coldest days/times of the year? At what times throughout the year do your temperatures start to shift?
• Wind patterns: What direction do storms come from? How about pressure systems?
• Rain patterns: Do you have a rainy or snowy season? When is it? Does your rain or snow typically come from a particular direction or location?
• Watersheds: How does your local area receive its potable water? Is it from rain sources, or an aquifer? Are there local rivers or other water sources worth honoring or protecting?
• Global weather patterns: How does your local weather fit into the larger scale of global trade winds and patterns? This is useful for figuring out what is necessary to make the weather happen where you live. It will also highlight how climate change could be changing your weather.

There are lots of places you can look to learn about your weather patterns, but it can sometimes be tricky to find information. My absolute favorite is WeatherSpark.com, because it has really nice graphs. I generally find that Wunderground.com, BestPlaces.net and USClimateData.com are also good places to start, but I don’t know how well these websites will work for non-US locations. So just in case it's helpful, here are some key words and phrases I often use:

• [zip code] weather patterns
• [zip code] weather history
• [zip code] annual rainfall
• [zip code] weather averages
• [state / province] watershed map
• [state / province] water resources

A lot of the websites you access will give you daily and weekly weather forecasts, and you can usually find “history” or “annual” tabs within these websites in order to see the bigger picture of how your weather pans out over a year.

Your weather information will provide you the backbone of your calendar. Analyzing the information should give you a general idea of what weather happens when in your region. And generally speaking, when weather happens, you have holidays.

The most important thing to get out of all of your weather information is a solid understanding of how your local weather works, and by extension, when your seasons actually occur. Don’t be afraid to move away from our standard, wrote ideas of the four seasons that are exactly the same length of time every year. In my experience, there are a lot of small shifts and changes that occur in every region throughout the yearly cycle, and to me, it feels worth honoring these changes as they occur, which might lead you away from a basic four equinoxes and four solstices.

For instance, you can use solar maps to determine when you have the most and least amount of sunlight within a given year; this is less about how much your region of the world is exposed to the sun, but more about how much of that solar energy actually makes it to the ground- which can be useful for people who happen to have interest in “light and dark” juxtaposition, or have solar-related practices / deities.

Another two seasons to consider adding to your calendar are your rainy and snowy season (if applicable). But while all of this generates the backbone of our calendar, you’ll note that many of these holidays lack any real direction for how to exactly celebrate them or participate in the natural shifts around you; it’s one thing to know when your summer starts and ends, or how much snow you get in the winter, but it's another to know how these seasons actually play out where you live.

Step Two: Adding the Layers

Ideally, we will want to incorporate localized elements like landforms, and fauna and flora into our yearly celebrations so that we’re genuinely connecting with the region we live in— not just a cardboard cutout that is generalized for ease of use.

Firstly, local weather will be heavily influenced by the landforms closest to you. Which is to say that looking at your local landforms will help to give you a better idea of how the weather works specifically where you’re at. Most of the weather information that you can pull will be from city centers and airports, and not all of us live in those specific locations where the weather data is pulled from. In order to tailor-fit your calendar, it’s best to observe whether landforms could be playing a role in your weather, and how that affects your yearly calendar.

It becomes really easy to ruther shift the scope of your weather into a larger and bigger scale, acknowledging how these come into contact with, and influence, global weather patterns as well.

The second role that landforms can play in your calendar is to be a potential focus of veneration or adoration. For example, if you live near a large body of water, you could involve having your celebrations at this body of water, or perhaps engaging in more direct action to protect or preserve it (whether through community action or volunteering to clean up the area, etc). From another angle, you may have learned that this large body of water serves as the main source of water for your local area. Knowing this, you may choose to incorporate this vital landform into your holidays, perhaps even creating a holiday that acknowledges your reliance on this water source existing.

Part of fleshing out your calendar is having the ability to make associations between your holidays and the world around you. These are ‘Seasonal Markers’- or anything that helps to alert you to a particular time in the cycle of your local ecology, and aid you in noticing that something is shifting around you. Some examples of what these could be are:

• The first flowers that pop up in spring
• A particular type of wind that indicates that snow is coming
• Migratory animals that are only in your region for brief periods of time throughout a given year
• The most-available natively-grown food item during your region’s “dead period” (most of you know it as winter)
• The first things that are edible in spring, or after the “dead period”
• The first leaves that change color during the fall

There are also ‘Sustainers’- keystone species that exist within your ecoregion, and which are essential to sustaining that ecosystem in a particularly large way. These include both fauna and flora, but could also include landforms and larger ecological systems such as mountains and reservoirs.

In many ways, I would argue that this category would qualify as an integral means of figuring out what is deeply sacred to an area, as Keystone species in particular leave a huge impact on the environment around them- so much so that they’re often used to gauge how healthy an ecological system is; when keystone species are removed from an ecosystem, the ecosystem is almost guaranteed to degrade and suffer until the balance is restored. As such, these species deserve a sacred status, and there is arguably some potency in celebrating certain key times in the life cycle of the species within this category. For example, if there is a tree that is a keystone species, and it bears fruit, it might be worth celebrating when its fruit comes into season.

When it comes to researching plants and fauna, and discovering these seasonal markers, these are the sorts of things that I would recommend looking into:

• Planting patterns: When do you typically plant and harvest where you live? Do you have one big growing season, or multiple smaller growing seasons?
• Eating patterns: Which of your native plants is edible, and could be reintroduced into the diet today? What are the growing and harvesting times for these plants? Are there specialty foods related to your specific region?
• Natives: What are some of the plants or fauna that are native to the area? Which of these are keystone species? Are any of them endangered?
• Invasives: Are there invasive plant species in your area? How about invasive animals?

Local ecosystems and landforms: Are there any forests, landforms, or other habitats nearby? Do these habitats (forests, deserts, etc.) influence your local fauna or weather?

Some search terms you could use to look up some of this information:

• USDA Grow Zone [zip code]
• USDA Heat Zone Map [zip code]
• [state / province] invasive plant species
• [state / province] native plants, native edible plants
• [county name] extension office, extension resources
• [county name] growing calendar

As a final note, we always say in permaculture that the most important skill that you can have is the skill of observation. When we are not sure, or are lost on how to proceed, observation should be our fallback tool for coming up with new ideas and inspiration. By watching the world around you, and taking note of what you experience and when, you open up the possibility to incorporate an ever growing number of associations for your calendar.

Step Three: Folding in Religion

If you’re religious, however, the process still isn’t quite complete yet. It’s not a religious calendar cycle, after all, if it’s missing the religious pieces. But there is no easy way to add these in, or to instruct you on how to do so.

Pretty much every religious tradition has symbols, themes, and concepts that infiltrate the mythology and living practices of anyone who participates in the religion. For Kemetics, we’ve got ma’at and isfet, we’ve got trees that give life, benben mounds that herald transformation and birth, just to name a few. When you’re trying to fold your religion into your calendar, I feel that using these symbols and concepts is a good way to begin to bridge the gap.

I think one of the easiest places to start this topic from is drawing direct natural associations between the elements in your calendar / region and your Deities themselves. It seems that most polytheistic religions have deities that are tied to the sun, tied to harvest, tied to water features- and so these deities could by the first to be easily incorporated into any local or seasonal aspects that correspond to their domain. Once you’ve found an association that resonates with you, you could then find ways to weave it into any current practices you have.

Step Four: Tweaks and Twiddling

After this, the rest is fiddling; observing the world around you, furthering your research, and actively practicing and celebrating, and tweaking as necessary; do not be afraid to change your calendar as you go, and as the world around you progresses. I would suggest, though, rooting these further changes first in that observation and interaction with the living earth. Here’s the basic practice:

1. Spend time in nature or with nature as close to where you live as possible (e.g if you have a daily hiking trail in a local park, use that trail. If you have a backyard, use that backyard). The goal here is to get you as close to nature at your own home as possible.
2. Try to observe nature at least twice a week for 10 to 20 minutes. Try to observe nature in your area this way for a full year.
3. While observing, try to disavow yourself of the notions of regular or standard seasonality- i/e “it is spring, therefore these specific things should happen”. Instead, simply observe.
4. Keep some kind of physical or digital records of your observations: photographs, videos, sketches, journal entries, or some other method.

In observing, note anything that changes- whether that is bloom times, snow melting, fogs rolling in, and so on. Consider where the ‘energy’ of the season is, and where the energy and power is within the land. For additional depth, note not only what is different or changing, but also how important those changes are to you and how they and the season’s energy makes you feel.

This approach doesn’t require much of a daily investment and can be built into existing spiritual practices. But it reaps incredibly rich rewards that deepens your calendar more than paper research possibly could. That doesn’t disavow further research, however. Here are some additional suggestions you might consider doing, adding, and researching as you go:

• Interview the Old Timers and Wise Folks: Talk with the old farmers, wise women, grannies, and grandpas in the area who have an innate knowledge. Ask them how they know spring has arrived, or that fall is coming. You might be surprised with the level of detail you get!
• Look to local farmers and farm products: A lot of traditional agricultural customs and products are directly dependent on the local ecosystems. You’ll see that reflected in my map above—the flowing of the maple sap, for example, as well as the budding of the maple tree are significant to me both because I have done sugaring most years, but also because of the broader cultural custom in this part of the US.
• Look at local customs and traditions: What are the stories of your area, both on a local and cultural scale? You might pay attention to regional or local fairs, or look at regional calendars to see what the important dates are. Some of these may be contemporary customs (like Groundhog Day) or customs that used to take place but no longer do (like Wassailing in January). Reading about the history of your region, particularly, feasts, celebrations, and traditional activities, might give you more insight.
• Consider family observances. Some families develop their own traditions, and some of those might be worth considering. For others, family traditions are often religious and may belong to a religion that you no longer want to associate with, and that’s ok too.
• See what nature exists around you. Explore your own backyard with a critical eye. What plants can you actually go and pick yourself? What are those plants associated with? Do you have access to a creek or river? What does your local land actually have on it? If magic correspondences for your local plants haven’t been written about, you may have to do your own research.
• Find the magic spots. These are places where the energy is just right for some reason. Somewhere you can go to be closer to nature, or a place you could host a ritual if needed. Sometimes it’s just a place where you can feel your mind open a little bit. Sometimes the urban legends will tip you off to these (usually in a bad way) but other times you can find them on your own. How can these be incorporated, or how can these impact things?
• Speak with the nature spirits. Spirits of the local land. House spirits. The spirits of the trees near you. Nature spirits wherever you are. Perhaps the most powerful thing you can do is to connect with the powerful energies of the landscape where you live, and see what wisdom they have for you (using any number of inner communication or divination methods). They’re out there! Be good to them and they’ll be good to you!

The calendar is about actively choosing to participate in the world around you. And through routine observation, intuition, and research, you can develop a highly personalized calendar that is regional and specific to your path. Not everything needs to be elaborate or large, however. But just by observing and paying attention, you are still participating in the natural patterns that occur around you.