Category: history

Celebrating the Autumn Equinox

Santa Rosa’s Own Harvest Festival at Bayer Farm

Some of the harvest of the 93 individual garden plots at Bayer Farm

My Regular Pagan Holiday Post

As the northern hemisphere tilts away from the sun this September, the autumn equinox arrives to signal a timeless transition. For centuries, cultures across the north have marked this shift with harvest festivals, and in Santa Rosa, this tradition finds a vibrant, modern home in the Festival de la Cosecha. Celebrating its 19th year, the festival is more than just a seasonal gathering; it is a living testament to the persistence of local environmentalists and land-planning activists who fought to ensure that nature and community could thrive amidst urban growth.

Mon Petit Chou

The heart of the celebration is Bayer Farm, a five-acre city park that stands as a victory of equitable urban planning. For a century, the surrounding Roseland neighborhood existed as an unincorporated pocket, an island of mostly Latinx working-class residents surrounded by the city. Historical records suggest that Santa Rosa’s ruling elite and political machine hesitated to annex the area, fearing that incorporating Roseland would introduce a wave of new voters who might shift the municipal balance of power. Consequently, the residents of Roseland were denied the basic infrastructure—sewers, fire protection, and parks—that the rest of the city enjoyed.

Making salsa

The creation of Bayer Farm broke this cycle of neglect. Born from a unique partnership between the City of Santa Rosa, LandPaths, and the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District (Ag + Open Space), the farm embodies a vision of healing and equitable access to nature. It provides a sanctuary of greenery and cultural celebration right in the heart of a neighborhood that was long overlooked.

The entrance to the farm

The existence of this sanctuary is rooted in a legacy of activism. In 1990, citizens voted to establish Ag + Open Space to combat unchecked urban sprawl and protect the region’s rural identity. Through a strategic blend of grants, conservation easements, and a quarter-cent sales tax, the District works with landowners to keep the land undeveloped. This effort has permanently protected over 127,000 acres of forests, oak woodlands, working ranches, and critical waterways. By shifting the region away from a path of development and toward a model of sustainable coexistence, these activists created the very landscapes that we local residents now hike and cherish daily.

Crushing grapes the old fashioned way

Complementing this preservation is the work of LandPaths, an organization that has spent 30 years fostering a love of the land. By managing Bayer Farm and leading creative outings in both English and Spanish, LandPaths ensures that nature’s inspiration is accessible to everyone, regardless of their background. Through nature camps and community-led stewardship, they turn the act of conservation into a shared community experience.

Pomo dancers performing in the meadow

On September 26, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., the Festival de la Cosecha brings this history to life. The air fills with the sounds of the Sonoma County Pomo Dancers and Danza Xantotl, while visitors engage in herbal medicine workshops, cooking demonstrations, and spirited salsa competitions. Between browsing community booths and picking out pumpkins and fresh vegetables, guests gather to recognize the land and the stewards—past and present—who fought to save it. In the laughter and abundance of the festival, Santa Rosa celebrates not just the harvest of the earth, but the harvest of a long-term commitment to justice, ecology, and community.

Bayer Farm is located on the ancestral homeland of the Southern Pomo people.

The Men She Left Behind

Flo stays in touch with soldiers in occupied Germany

My Mother and Audie Murphy Chapter 122

In the spring of 1946, Flo had made it back home, but she remained connected to her friends in occupied Germany. One of them was a family friend from her hometown of Yakima, Major Dan Wickersham. In her album she posted a biographical sketch of him along with some pictures of others who stayed in the occupied zone. 

According to the sketch, “Major Wickersham has been with the Third Division longer than any other officer now present, and he has some definite ideas about how the peace should be kept.

“The public cry of ‘send my boy home to me’ is so depleting the Occupation Forces that we will soon be hard pressed to carry out all the projects required to adequately secure and maintain the Army of Occupation,” the major says.

“A victory that cost so much must be adequately protected. However, I have complete confidence that the Occupation will be successful and with new replacements that will begin to come from the States in December, effective strength will be assured.

“The future? Well, I love the Army and have given it six of the best years of my life, but at times my wife and that apple orchard in Yakima, Washington, look mighty good to me.”

The American Occupation Force remained in Germany for a decade, until 1955. I don’t know when Maj. Wickersham was able to return to Yakima. In the meantime, Flo commiserated (and fished) with his wife, also named Florence.

The Flos–Wick and Wickersham

The first anniversary of the Southern France invasion was August 15, 1946.

My brother Don found this clipping from the Nevada State Journal, 1956. Dan Wickersham’s granddaughter told me he died in a fishing accident on the Columbia River in 1964.

Comrades in the Occupied Zone sent pictures

Col. John A. Heintges (Flo’s 1945 Xmas date who later became a general) and Lt. Col. Ralph Flynn, 7th Infantry Regiment (L), Lt. Leland Nelson, whose parents Flo visited in Walla Walla WA (R)

Regimental staff, 30th Infantry

Col. Lionel G. McGarr, Reg. commander 30th Infantry at a funeral in Paris

2nd Lt. E.P. Homola

Chapter 123: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/09/21/flo-awarded-the-bronze-star/

Why Did the Cagneys Dump Murphy?

Bravery on the Battlefield Doesn’t Make an Actor

My Mother and Audie Murphy Chapter 121

In July 1946, James Cagney spotted the face of war hero Audie Murphy on the cover of Life magazine. To Cagney and his brother William, who ran their own production company, the twenty-year-old was a striking find—a “cute” kid with the kind of look that sells tickets. They signed him, brought him to Hollywood, and installed him in James’s guest house.

The arrangement was fraught from the start. One stormy night, Cagney went to check on Murphy, who was battling chronic nightmares. In a flash of combat-reflex, Murphy pulled a loaded Luger on Cagney. James managed to talk him down, but the encounter served as a visceral reminder that Murphy had brought the war home with him.

James Cagney. Photo: Creative Commons Public Domain

Despite the Cagneys’ efforts to school him in acting and dancing, Murphy never landed a role in their films. By 1947, he was released from his contract, reportedly following a disagreement with William Cagney.

Speculation regarding their fallout persists. Some argue Murphy simply lacked the craft; indeed, Murphy once admitted, “I’m working under a great handicap… no talent.” For Cagney, a devotee of the actor’s art, this was the crux of the issue. He maintained a sacred line between heroism and performance. “The man’s a hero,” Cagney once remarked, “but being brave on the battlefield doesn’t make you a master of the stage or screen.”

Cagney believed true acting required a soul-deep emotional truth that medals could not buy. He viewed the industry’s trend of casting “manufactured stars” as a betrayal of the profession. In private, he was blunter, noting that Murphy’s delivery sounded rehearsed and lacked authenticity. This wasn’t born of animosity—Cagney deeply respected Murphy’s service, admitting he could never match the soldier’s courage in Europe—but of a principled fury. He loathed that Hollywood was trading artistry for easy profit, using fame as a substitute for talent.

This divide represented two different Americas: one celebrating the patriotic icon, the other defending the sanctity of art. Their unspoken friction became a commentary on a timeless Hollywood dilemma: is stardom earned through craft or bestowed through fame?

While they maintained a distant acquaintance after the contract ended, Cagney recognized that Murphy had never truly left the war behind; he simply treated every role as a new battlefield. Behind the angelic face lived a ticking time bomb. Some theorists suggest the Cagneys eventually let him go simply out of fear—a theory that requires little explanation. Ultimately, Cagney likely intended to protect and mentor Murphy, but found the task of bridging the gap between a soldier’s trauma and an actor’s truth to be overwhelming.

Chapter 122: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/09/10/still-in-the-occupied-zone/

Audie Murphy After the War

A Timeline of His Post-War Life

My Mother and Audie Murphy Chapter 119

He was a war hero—THE most decorated hero of World War Two—and that was his epithet, even as he became a Hollywood movie star with more than 40 movies to his credit.

What no one, and especially the US military, wanted to talk about was the degradation of his life because of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and, I would argue, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Audie Murphy survived the war but not his invisible injuries.

To understand Audie Murphy’s post-war life, I’ve created a timeline that will help me explore the details in future posts.

Audie Murphy Post-War Timeline

My mother Flo’s famous picture of Audie when he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in the field May 12, 1945

Chapter 120: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/09/01/back-home-depression-takes-over/

A Day to Thank the Earth

My Regular Pagan Holiday Post

In Andean cultures, the feminine figure was valued as a living expression of Pachamama’s attributes. AI generated image

August 1 in the northern hemisphere is celebrated as Lammas, the first harvest day. In South America it is Pachamama Day, the start of the growing season.

I first encountered the idea more than fifty years ago, but I didn’t recognize its importance until much later.

While reading Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, I kept noticing one name in the footnotes: Alfred Crosby. The name stopped me. Crosby had taught history at my alma mater, Washington State University, and I had been his student.

At the time I knew him simply as a professor. I had no idea I was sitting in the classroom of a historian who would change the way the world understood history.

In 1972 Crosby published The Columbian Exchange, introducing a revolutionary way of thinking about European conquest. History, he argued, was not driven only by kings, generals, and battles. Plants, animals, microbes, and ecosystems were just as important. His work essentially created the field of environmental history.

The Columbian Exchange describes the enormous movement of crops, livestock, diseases, technologies, and cultures between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia after Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. Potatoes, tomatoes, and corn transformed Europe, Africa, and Asia. Horses and cattle transformed the Americas. But the deadliest travelers were invisible.

In Ecological Imperialism, Crosby argued that European conquest depended as much on biology as on military power. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and other diseases swept through Indigenous populations that had no immunity. Entire societies were devastated before they could organize resistance. Europeans inherited landscapes emptied by epidemics as much as they conquered them by force.

Charles Mann takes the story even further. He argues that the Americas were home to far larger populations than historians once believed—perhaps tens of millions more. The continent Europeans imagined as a wilderness had actually been carefully managed for centuries by Indigenous peoples. Forests, fields, rivers, and grasslands all bore the imprint of human stewardship.

The tragedy becomes even greater in that light. Not only were millions of people lost; countless traditions, languages, and ways of understanding the natural world nearly disappeared with them.

Nearly—but not entirely.

Some traditions survived.

Every August 1, Indigenous communities across Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina celebrate Pachamama Raymi, or Festival of Mother Earth, one of the oldest pre-Hispanic ceremonies still practiced in South America. Pachamama, from the Quechua words pacha (world, space, or time) and mama (mother), is often translated as Mother Earth. But she is more than the ground beneath our feet. She represents the living world that nourishes all life. Pachamama is the fertility goddess in Inca mythology, responsible for planting, harvesting, creating mountains and earthquakes, as well as the very existence of life on Earth.

The celebration coincides with the start of the agricultural season in the southern hemisphere and centers on a simple but profound idea: reciprocity.

The Earth feeds us. We must feed the Earth.

On August 1, farmers allow their fields to rest. Families prepare offerings of cooked foods, corn, potatoes, fruits, coca leaves, medicinal herbs, chicha, seeds, and flowers. A small hole is dug in the ground—symbolically Pachamama’s mouth—and the gifts are placed into the earth. The offering is not payment but gratitude, an acknowledgment that human life depends on the generosity of the land.

It is, in essence, Thanksgiving.

Long before Europeans arrived in the Americas, Andean peoples had developed a tradition that recognized what modern environmental science is only beginning to emphasize: humans are not separate from nature. We exist because of it.

The ritual feels remarkably relevant today. We celebrate technological progress while exhausting soils, warming the climate, polluting rivers, and treating the Earth as an endless warehouse of resources. Pachamama Day offers another way of thinking—not about ownership, but relationship; not about extraction, but reciprocity.

I find myself wishing we had something similar in our Western culture.

Our Thanksgiving has become centered on football, shopping, and overeating, with little reflection on the land that produces our food or on the Indigenous peoples who first cultivated many of the crops on our tables. Imagine setting aside a single day each year not to consume more, but to acknowledge our dependence on healthy soil, clean water, pollinating insects, and the astonishing web of life that makes our existence possible.

Perhaps that is why Crosby’s work and Pachamama Day seem connected to me.

Crosby taught that history cannot be understood without ecology. The Andean peoples never separated the two in the first place.

One explains how civilizations rose and fell. The other reminds us how to live.

As August 1 approaches, I think about the professor whose lectures made a great impression on me, the civilizations whose knowledge survived against overwhelming odds, and the simple wisdom embodied in a handful of food returned to the soil.

The Earth has always sustained us.

Perhaps it’s time we remembered to say thank you.

On the Ship, Sailing into NY Harbor

Chapter 116 My Mother and Audie Murphy

Seeing Liberty: What Does the Statue Symbolize?

In Sweden, afternoon coffee is a daily ritual, and my grandmother Gerda carried the tradition with her to America. We often joined her at her tiny house in Yakima and later at her apartment in a senior housing complex across from the Presbyterian church.

As Grandma arranged homemade butter cookies on her little table and poured coffee into delicate cups, she reminisced about sailing into New York Harbor and seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time in 1905. She had been herded toward the line marked Aliens. The statue, rising above the harbor, filled her with emotion. Forty-four years later, after returning from a visit to Sweden, she saw it again. This time she joined the line marked American Citizens.

Flo on the deck of the USAT George Washington crossing the Atlantic

For Gerda, the Statue of Liberty symbolized America’s welcome to immigrants.

“I could only think, This time I’m a citizen,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.

My mother, Flo, sailed into New York Harbor in 1946 as she returned from Europe after the war. For her, the statue carried different memories. It reminded her of enormous loss—her fiancé and many friends had been killed—but also of pride. She and her generation had fought fascism and prevailed.

“When I saw the Statue of Liberty, I thought about all the people who died in that war,” Flo said. “The Americans were fighting for democracy.”

Ship dinner menu for March 25, 1946

Her face crumpled. A tear rolled down her cheek. Soon both my mother and grandmother were crying. To me, it seemed almost hysterical.

Flo loved history and liked to imagine the future.

“Maybe by the turn of the twenty-first century,” she sniffled, “war will be history.”

Lounging on deck. It took the Geo Washington about ten days to sail from France to NYC

Both women were unabashed patriots. Flo flew the American flag every Fourth of July, though by the early 1970s she had also become deeply troubled by America’s conduct in Vietnam. Gerda proudly displayed both the American flag and the blue-and-yellow Swedish flag in her home. She liked to say that she had voted in every election open to women since becoming a citizen.

I was not a flag waver. I was a flag burner—metaphorically. I never actually set fire to a flag, but my brother and I once cut up an American flag to sew a shirt. It was illegal then; today it might pass as a right-wing fashion statement. To me the flag represented a country whose foreign policy included overthrowing democratically elected governments, assassinating foreign leaders, and installing compliant dictators.

A musician entertains the crowd of GIs on deck

I had never seen my grandmother cry before, but I had often seen my mother cry, usually over war. During the Vietnam War she would call me in tears, saying her generation had failed to end war and now the responsibility belonged to mine. She carried the suffering of the world on her shoulders.

I vowed never to be like her. I wouldn’t cry. Crying was weakness—or so the culture taught me. Men didn’t cry, and men held the power. I wanted to be like them.

That afternoon, what struck me as sentimental nostalgia repelled me. I had never sailed into New York Harbor and never would. When I looked at the Statue of Liberty, I didn’t see freedom. I saw the thousands of Southeast Asians killed in a war my country was waging, the millions of tons of bombs dropped on civilians, villages burned, children scarred by napalm.

A finger points to the sign on shore reading “Welcome Home. Well Done.”

Years later, I began to wonder whether my mother’s extraordinary empathy exacted a physical toll. She was repeatedly hospitalized with severe asthma attacks. The disease eventually killed her at seventy.

Later still, I came to believe that Flo had probably returned from the war with what we now recognize as PTSD. The government had little interest in acknowledging psychological trauma, even among combat veterans, much less civilian war workers like my mother.

In NY harbor the Transportation Corps sign reads “Welcome Home.”

Like so many Boomers, I had grown up with a parent emotionally wounded by war.

At the time, though, I understood none of that.

All I felt was embarrassment at her tears.

The Statue of Liberty had meant hope to my grandmother, sacrifice to my mother, and hypocrisy to me. It took me a while to understand that all three meanings could be true at once.

Now, when I see the statue and read the Emma Lazarus poem, I’m the one who’s crying. I still cry for the people we kill in endless needless wars, for the immigrats we imprison, murder and deport, and I cry for our democracy and all that we have lost.

Photo by Tom Coe on Unsplash
The famous inscription mounted inside the statue

To start at the beginning of this story: https://mollymartin.blog/2024/11/04/my-mother-and-audie-murphy/

Chapter 117: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/08/02/catching-some-culture-in-nyc/

Going Home After 2 Years in Europe

Flo Boards the USAT George Washington at port of Le Havre

Chapter 115 My Mother and Audie Murphy

Flo and her cohort of Red Cross workers and G.I.s boarded the USAT George Washington at the port of Le Havre, France for the trip to New York. The ship was commissioned by the US Navy for troop transport in both the first and second world wars. 

Orders. Flo was hoping to accompany her friend Janet Tyson on the ship home but it appears they missed each other. Flo wanted to visit relatives in Sweden first.
Waiting to board the ship home
At the port of Le Havre where most US ships departed from
Lifeboat on the USAT George Washington
“Nissen huts at Le Havre”
Many flags. Photos by Flo Wick

An ocean liner built in 1908 for the Bremen-based North German Lloyd, at that time the George Washington was the largest German-built steamship and the third-largest ship in the world. Built to emphasize comfort over speed, she was sumptuously appointed in her first-class passenger areas and could carry a total of 2,900 passengers. Intended for Bremen to New York passenger service, the ship was named after the first president of the United States as a way to make the ship more appealing to immigrants, who then made up the majority of transatlantic passengers and believed formalities on arrival would be easier on a ship with an American name. After a fire, the ship was sold for scrap in 1951.

USAT George Washington. Photo: NavSource

Chapter 116: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/07/12/on-the-ship-and-sailing-into-ny-harbor/

Flo in Paris for One Last Visit

She saw topless dancers, fashion shows, museums

Chapter 114: Continuing the story of My Mother and Audie Murphy

On March 6, 1946, my mother, Florence Wick, received travel orders to go to Paris from Kassel Germany by rail for the purpose of returning to the U.S. She had been in Europe almost two years working as a Red Cross “donut girl.” She must have been delighted to be going home, and also to have the opportunity to visit Paris one last time. It would indeed be the last time she saw Paris.

Travel orders March 6, 1946

This is what as a child I remember Flo telling me about Paris. The fragrance on the overcrowded trams overwhelmed; people doused themselves with perfume to cover body odor. The public urinals were everywhere, except they were only for men. There was no place for women to relieve themselves. What were women supposed to do? she wondered.

One of the ubiquitous pissoirs. Photo: The Guardian

In the Louvre she got up close enough to the Mona Lisa to see that the painting was surprisingly small and covered with tiny cracks. She also said the only French most American soldiers learned was coucher avec moi, or “sleep with me”, probably asked as a question. But in general she was smitten with the romantic city.

She went to the Moulin Rouge and Tabarin where women danced bare-breasted. She visited famous museums. She saw fashion shows. And she recorded it all in her WWII album.  She included pages from LIFE magazine’s feature about post-war Paris.

Paris was occupied by Nazi Germany from June 14, 1940, until its liberation on August 25, 1944. The occupation was marked by strict regulations, food rationing, and significant hardships for the civilian population, including the persecution of Jews.

Despite the oppressive conditions, a network of resistance groups emerged, engaging in acts of defiance against the occupiers. The liberation of Paris began on August 19, 1944, with an uprising led by the French Resistance and the Communist Party, culminating in the city’s liberation by Allied forces on August 25, 1944. This marked a significant turning point in the war and the end of the Nazi regime’s control over the city. To read more, I recommend the book The Liberation of Paris by Jean Edward Smith.

It Belongs Also to Parisians: Photographs for LIFE by Edward Clark
Quoting from LIFE: “Paris, the grand courtesan of cities, is all things to all men, and this may be one reason why American soldiers and Parisians have been getting along so badly since World War II. The G.I. grew up in a generation when Paris to most Americans was a cheerful bawd: the Paris of Maxim‘s, the Ritz bar, the Moulin Rouge, the Scheherezade, and Boeuf sur le Toit, the Folies Bergéres, long-haired Montparnasse, feelthy pictures, the Quatz’ Arts Ball, and the Sphinx. To the young man who had seen this Paris in pictures who had read about it in Fitzgerald and Hemmingway, who had overheard wise conversations between his father and his uncle Tom, the Paris in which he found himself these last two winters was a grim and depressing disappointment. He found people who were cold, hungry, confused and tired–above all tired–who were too busy keeping themselves alive to bother much about entertaining him, who, because they were proud and sensitive to the shame through which their country had passed, resented his slurs and his swagger. And the G.I., in turn, felt cheated. Where was the Paris he had heard about? Where were the naked women?”

Paris was the capital of the fashion world. The industry started to come back to life in 1945 after the war. There was one fashion show but too little fabric. Then in 1946 the shows were bigger and better with a wider choice of fabrics. Flo attended several fashion shows and included stories about them in her album. It’s interesting to learn about the fashion industry scene right after the war. Paris was worried that it might move to the U.S. where it had moved during the German occupation.

Paris Makes Fashion Comeback

Quoting from LIFE magazine: “The haute couture of Paris, in a do or die bid for fashion leadership of the world, last month held its first complete fashion showings in seven years. During the fortnight in which the season reached its peak fashion, starved Parisians, important customers and a few foreign buyers were dashing to half a dozen shows a day from Lelong to Maggy Rouff to Rochas to the new wonder boys like Fath and Balmain. 

The showings brought back the elegance of years that seemed long past. There were champagne and delicacies and soft music. French princesses came as did the Duchess of Windsor and the King of Egypt’s sister. What they saw made the experts feel that Paris had successfully regained the world fashioned leadership, which had passed by default during the war to the U.S. An analysis of the portfolio of photographs by LIFE‘s Nina Leen, first to reach the U.S., shows that the general trend is away from the “woman-cut-in-two” look toward a better proportioned silhouette. The new clothes follow body contours. Daytime skirts are a little longer and less full. Jackets dip in back. Shoulders are more natural. In afternoon and evening dresses the deep-cut fronts and bared shoulders (“bathtub decolletages”) reveal almost as much bosom as Restoration fashions. Reversing itself, Paris this year showed more colors and patterns than solid blacks. The luxury and glitter of the Paris showings made a strange contrast with the arrival in Washington of Léon Blum to beg a $2 billion loan. But, actually, the fashion export business is a big item in France’s trade. Last week all Frenchmen hoped that the prodigal shows would pay off in orders from all over the world, especially the U.S.”

Corduroy: A lowly, rugged fabric is used in new and elegant Paris styles

From LIFE: “For the past hundred years corduroy has been the sturdy, dependable fabric for work clothes. From the farms of Missouri to the vineyards of France, farmer and peasant have chosen it for its warmth and ruggedness. Made of cotton with raised ridges, it is almost indestructible. Like the tread on a tire, the ridges, which are called wales, protect the basic fabric against wear and tear. In the early 20s U.S. college boys began to wear slacks of corduroy and later college girls adopted it for jackets and skirts. But it retained its lowly character. 

This spring the French haute couture took a good look at corduroy and discovered it offers more than wearability. It also has beauty. It has a velvetlike pile and good design possibilities in its ridges. Furthermore Cosserat et Cie., which since 1850 has been making all the corduroy in France, this year came out with bright new pinks, yellows and greens. As a result corduroy has now become a fabric for elegant Parisian clothes.”

Where the correspondents hung out

From the LIFE caption: The Scribe Hotel barroom is the headquarters and the hangout of correspondents in France. Here artist Floyd Davis found old acquaintances of the Time and LIFE European staff. At the table in center the New Yorker’s Janet Flanner, broadcaster William Shirer, and novelist Ernest Hemingway. Every other day, the bar served brandy, and then the place was crowded with correspondents who drank the brandy, they insisted, just to keep warm. Correspondents rushed out to the front to get stories. Disheveled correspondents rushed back from the front to file their stories. At any time, reporters could be heard complaining about sensors, brass hats, editors.

Where the naked women were

From the Tabarin playbill saved by Flo

To start at the beginning Chapter One: https://mollymartin.blog/2024/11/04/my-mother-and-audie-murphy/

Chapter 115: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/07/07/going-home-after-2-years-in-europe/

Midsomer Hails to Vikings’ Time

My Regular Pagan Holiday Post

Summer Solstice (Litha) takes place this year on June 21

The pagan Scandinavian summer solstice festival, like winter solstice, was appropriated by christians. But, unlike christmas, the takeover never really stuck. They tried to turn midsummer into a birthday party for John the Baptist. Bonfires that once warded off evil spirits and celebrated the sun’s strength became “St. John’s fires,” but the essential ritual survived unchanged. As they did in pre-christian Viking times, Swedes, Norwegians and Danes continue to make flower wreaths, dance around the maypole, sing, eat, drink and light giant bonfires. 

I identify as Swedish because of my grandmother Gerda, who instilled our family’s culture. My grandfather Bernt was Norwegian, so we absorbed some of that tradition too. 

In her 90s Grandma Wick dressed in her Swedish costume
My mother, Flo, photographed this woman in Swedish dress at a Midsomer festaval 1979

Growing up in Yakima, Washington, we simply picnicked and ate outdoors all summer, perhaps an American substitute for the ritual. But my brother remembers our mother, who was born at Midsommer, hosting parties in June with a maypole for us kids to wind ribbons around. She had never been to a Midsomer festival, but her Scandinavian parents had impressed upon her the importance of this holiday.

Flo took this picture and the one at top raising the maypole at a Swedih Midsomer festival when we visited in 1979

Swedes gather at big communal and family events. Norwegians build fires. Oslo’s most dramatic public showcase occurs at Sukkerbiten, the sauna wharves on the fjord, where massive burning displays light the water. The Slinningsbålet in Ålesund ranks among the world’s tallest bonfires—a striking coastal tradition. In some places a figure is built and then burned. Think Burning Man.

This year, we’ll mark the solstice on June 21 at Sonoma County’s first dyke march—marching, singing, eating, and drinking. Living in a fire-prone region, we’ll celebrate without bonfires, but the spirit of communal gathering remains.

Skål!

Love, Molly and Holly

Gearing Up for a May Day Protest

My Regular Pagan Holiday Post

50th anniversary celebration of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution. Photo: IF DDR

May 1 International Workers Day

Beltane, the pagan holiday

April 25 Portugal’s Freedom Day

International Workers’ Day on May 1 had its start in the USA. The observance was first proclaimed after scores were killed in police raids on nonviolent workers agitating for the eight-hour day in Chicago in 1886. In the U.S., anti-socialist sentiment and political pressure has limited its observance. But other—many other—countries in the world celebrate this holiday that honors the people who actually work to build our societies and cultures and infrastructure!

This May Day, Americans are organizing a massive day of nonviolent, economic disruption to protest the pillaging of our environment, the dismantling of our democracy, and the shredding of our social safety net at the hands of the billionaire class.

We are on the way to Morocco for a women’s hiking trip in the Atlas Mountains, and on May Day we’ll be in Portugal. Both of these countries celebrate International Workers Day with marches, community gatherings and a day off work. I hope to parade with the Portuguese in Lisbon.

Portugal’s prime minister, Luís Montenegro, said “Today we celebrate with all workers: those who produce, create and contribute to a more productive and socially responsible country.”

Perhaps we Americans can take inspiration from the Portuguese revolution. The 1974 revolution, known as the Carnation Revolution, was a nearly bloodless military coup that overthrew the Estado Novo regime, ending over 40 years of fascism. It marked the beginning of Portugal’s transition to democracy and led to the independence of several African colonies.

The Carnation Revolution got its name from restaurant worker Celeste Caeiro who offered carnations to soldiers when the population took to the streets to celebrate the end of the dictatorship. Other demonstrators followed suit and placed carnations in the muzzles of guns and on soldiers’ uniforms. In Portugal, April 25, Freedom Day, is a national holiday that commemorates the revolution.