Why we need seasonal and regional stories and celebrations...

There is a familiarity that comes from our seasonal experience of place. The change in weather, landscape, light. With repetition comes knowledge. With familiarity of place, comes a sense of belonging. With annual cycle comes expectation, excitement and joy. The turning of the year is cause for celebration.

But the focus of our seasonal celebrations has been confused.

Our celebrations still retain regionally rooted seasonal decorations and feasts but our place specific seasonal stories and songs have been usurped. Figures of local seasonal mythology have been hijacked by the characters from global religions and high stakes consumerism. The characters of our festivities- once tied to nature and environment -the non-human and earthly, Holly, Frost and Hare -have become human and Heavenly kings, virgins, saints and traitors, or figures with hidden marketing agendas all disconnected from specific season or locality.

Deliberately we have been led to repeat these religious and consumerist tales in annual celebrations; the repetition fixes knowledge and by making these stories integral and familiar parts of our joyful celebrations, we become emotionally attached to them and the characters within. We likely have an inordinate fondness for a certain jolly old man in a red suit and can recite by heart the star-lit story of a baby in a manger. We do not need to reject the messages texts or campaigns wholesale. A gift of chocolate is sweet enough and doubtless, religious stories are important for believers and those interested in learning from their lessons in history and messages of human morality. However, we must not let these tales block the repetitive seasonal opportunities for learning about our environment or replace the joy and celebration that comes from the direct experience of the familiarity of belonging to a locality.

Let's disentangle religious worship from celebration of season.

Let's remove vacuous consumerist rhetoric.

Let's revive and invent place specific stories and songs.

Let's imbue their settings with the description and distinction of a time of year and give our landscape, and the creatures around, agency and adventure.

Let's learn these stories by heart, through the repetition of the cyclical calendar, and learn to cherish them through the festivity of our celebrations.

Maybe then, when we begin to know and love the seasonal stories of our own places, we will recognise, name and celebrate and cherish their characters. We will joyously see them as kin in the place we belong. We will really notice them around us in our daily lives.

Maybe then we will notice too their altered or uncharacteristic behaviour and even disappearance from the places we expect to see them or at the times we plan to celebrate them. Maybe then we will recognise their peril is real and have enough emotional attachment to take action to ensure these characters do not become purely the stuff of myth.