Celebrating Mabon

A week and a half ago, I put together a small-ish feast to celebrate the Autumn Equinox/Mabon. I have recently come to the decision that this is the year that celebrating traditional holidays needs to come to an end. So from this point, we will not be celebrating Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or Easter. Instead the Wheel of the Year will guide our celebrations! 

I am still learning the different Sabbats, but Mabon was our “thanksgiving.” I spent the entire day of September 22nd cooking and creating. It felt very satisfying to be using my hands and celebrating the turning of the seasons. 

I went looking through recipes and blog posts on Pinterest, and decided on making two recipes from this gal’s blog – Jessica Jewett.

I made the pot roast and butternut squash soup. Although, I did make some adjustments to the recipes due to my somewhat strict way of eating restrictions. Instead of potatoes, I did turnips and cauliflower. 

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Once I got the pot roast on and all of the squash and other veggies in my second crockpot, I got down to cleaning and making a wreath for my front door! 

I scoured the shelves of Joann Fabrics trying to find the makings of a wreath that really spoke to me. Two years ago, when I was started to get into celebrating the Wheel of the Year Sabbats, I made a wreath for Lammas, which is at the beginning of August. Since I missed Lammas this year, I really wanted to have some sort of autumn decoration that I had made for myself. 

Once the wreath was finished, attention was turned to cleaning and cleansing my space. My spouse helped with corralling our kiddos and cleaning. The weather outside was so bright and sunny and cool! 

I grew up cooking for my rather large family, so when I first got married, it was really hard to adjust cooking for only two people instead of the big amount I cooked for before. It took me almost all of the first 5 years of our marriage to get back to a place where I actually enjoyed cooking. Ha, then I got really sick, and the physical symptoms of my chronic illnesses went into significant overdrive. So I had to completely revamp what I could or couldn’t eat. The past 5 months have been the first consecutive months that I have been able to consistently eat food without getting sick after every meal. 

This has meant that planning for a feast like the one I wanted to do for Mabon gets a little more complicated than just following a recipe. I am grateful for the cooking knowledge and instinct I have, but it is still frustrating at times to want to celebrate a Sabbat that consists of honoring the harvest, and what’s commonly associated with the harvest? Bread. And I can’t eat bread, of almost any kind.

Anyway, I figured my way around my food restrictions, and when the butternut squash soup was done, oh my, it was heavenly! I used an immersion blender to blend up the pieces of veggies. I was unsure if it would actually work, but with the combination of buttery soft vegetables from having been in the crockpot for several hours, and a powerful immersion blender, the soup turned out completely silky smooth at the end! 

The pot roast was falling apart as I pulled it from the crockpot. The only downside to having been cooking all day long is that I had been smelling and test-tasting all of the food so when we sat down to finally eat, I was barely hungry! It was all so good though!

It definitely felt like a “Thanksgiving” and I am satisfied that we have replaced that traditional holiday. The next on my list is Samhain!