Tag: Lunar New Year

End of the Persephone Period

My Regular Pagan Holiday Post: Imbolc

Today, January 23, marks the end of the Persephone Period here in Sonoma County.    

Have you heard of the Persephone Period? It’s a concept we’ve only recently discovered, but it’s already proving to be a valuable guide for us gardeners.  

Most of us are familiar with the myth of Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, the goddess of agriculture. According to Greek mythology, Persephone was abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld. Grief-stricken, Demeter caused the earth to grow barren until a compromise was reached: Persephone would spend four months of the year in the underworld, during which the earth experienced winter, and then return to bring the renewal of spring.  

In gardening terms, the Persephone Period begins on the last day of the year with 10 hours of sunlight and ends when daylight hours rise above 10. Across much of the Northern Hemisphere, this period typically spans mid-November to early February. I like to think of it as starting around Samhain, the pagan holiday on November 1, and ending at Imbolc on February 1. Another fitting end point is the lunar new year, which in 2025 falls on January 29.  

In Northern California, our Persephone Period is shorter than in regions further north. In Sonoma County, it starts on November 18 and ends today.  

The Myth Meets Science 

Ornamental flowers blooming now
Narcissus

The Persephone Period isn’t just a poetic reference—it mirrors the biological response of plants to diminishing sunlight. When daylight drops below 10 hours, most plants enter dormancy, conserving energy and resources to survive the colder months. Growth slows or halts entirely, allowing plants to endure harsh conditions and rebound when warmth and light return.  

For gardeners, understanding this phenomenon is key to successful planning. During the Persephone Period, it’s best to avoid sowing seeds or transplanting seedlings, as plants struggle to establish themselves while dormant.  

Tobacco
Miner’s lettuce
Native verbena

Timing Is Everything  

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we’re lucky to have a “secret season” for winter gardening. The key to success is planting seeds well before the Persephone Period begins, giving plants enough time to develop roots and begin growing before sunlight dwindles. 

In the past, I assumed planting when rains come in October—or even early November—was sufficient. Snow peas planted in our garden in October yield a crop by February. But Sonoma County Master Gardeners recommends planting winter seeds as early as August or September. This gives plants more time to grow before the Persephone Period slows them down. The downside? Planting in late summer requires consistent watering, often daily or every other day, during the dry months—a challenge for many gardeners. 

Our Winter Garden  

I’ll admit, I’m not particularly enthusiastic about winter vegetables like carrots or Brussels sprouts—they’re cheap and plentiful at local farmers’ markets. But I do appreciate winter greens. I love being able to harvest greens in the middle of winter. Just now I’m snacking on miner’s lettuce, coming up around the garden. The kale I planted last year has grown to an impressive three feet tall. Birds, especially finches, eat the leaves and so we’ve left those plants for the birds.

Calendula
Wooly blue curls

Seasonal Markers

Other plants, too, thrive here even during the Persephone Period. The start of winter rains wakes them up. Here are a few standouts in our winter garden:  

Calendulas: Their cheerful, easy-to-grow blooms brighten the garden. 

Woolly blue curls: A native plant gifted by a friend, it’s flourishing in our front yard.  

Native verbena: A reliable bloomer nearly all year long.  

Ornamental flowers: Planted in the fall, they’re still adding a welcome burst of color.  

Narcissus: Lovely, though I find their fragrance too overpowering for indoors—I’ve had to move the gifted bouquet outside.  

And last week our daffodils started blooming!

Winter may bring shorter days and quieter rhythms, but it also offers its own moments of beauty. Between the blooms in the garden and the bounty of oranges from our old tree, I’ve learned to appreciate the Persephone Period for what it is: a time of rest, resilience, and subtle life persisting through the season’s challenges.  

To all a blooming Imbolc and festive Lunar New Year!

Queering Lunar New Year

My regular pagan holiday letter

Dear Friends,

Ah, the legendary red envelope – a festive pocket-sized surprise filled with cash, making it rain luck on New Year’s Day. My memory holds onto that one special red packet, a gift from my friend MeiBeck, a tradeswoman sister, and an ironworker extraordinaire. 

Inside? A crisp two-dollar bill, because we’re both as queer as a two-dollar bill. With that red envelope, MeiBeck queered Chinese New Year, and confirmed me as a member of her fabulous queer family!

We were among millions of people celebrating the Lunar New Year, a serious party among East and Southeast Asian cultures–Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and more. The celebration can be traced back 4000 years.

Lunar New Year begins on the date of the second new moon after the winter solstice, which usually occurs December 21. This means that the first day of the Lunar New Year can take place anytime between January 21 and February 20. This year, the year of the dragon, the celebration kicks off on February 10. Forget one-day celebrations; this shindig lasts for 15 days, rocking the lunar party until the moon is full, at the lantern festival on the last day.

At Lunar New Year we celebrate the end of winter and the start of spring. Traditionally, New Year’s is all about family, ancestor honoring, feasting, dancing dragons, lanterns and of course fireworks! China traditionally marks Lunar New Year and other holidays with loud firecrackers to rid families and businesses of bad luck.

We all know that the Chinese invented fireworks. As the story goes, around 800 CE, an alchemist mixed sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate (a food preservative) hoping to find the secret to eternal life. Instead, the mixture caught on fire, and gunpowder was born! When the powder was packed into bamboo or paper tubes and lit on fire, history had its first fireworks.

According to legend, the centuries-old New Year’s tradition was started to scare off demons. Fireworks helped drive away the mythological nian, a fierce lionlike beast that rose from the sea each New Year’s Day to feast on Chinese villagers and their livestock. Nian disliked loud noises and the color red, so villagers posted red signs on their doors and lit firecrackers. The ritual is still performed to ward off evil spirits.

My friend MeiBeck in her ironworker gear. Photo edit by Lyn Shimizu

I caught a double dose of airport fireworks during a long layover in Beijing—both landing pre-dawn and taking off that night. It was awesome! But that was before China’s state media cast the practice as an environmental faux pas, an air polluting indulgence. The state now urges families to use flowers and electronic substitutes instead.

Hundreds of Chinese cities have banned or restricted the use of pyrotechnics since 2018. Beijing extended a downtown fireworks ban across the entire city in 2022, allowing it to record its cleanest air on record since the monitoring of hazardous PM2.5 particles began in 2013.

Major Chinese cities organized official displays to ring in 2023. But across the country, members of the public celebrated China’s first post-COVID New Year by disregarding the ban. Social media images showed people shooting fireworks from the backs of mopeds and through car windows.

San Francisco, where I lived for 40+ years, has a large Asian population, and the Lunar New Year still paints the town red. Many neighborhoods are bustling in the lead up to the new year. The whole city celebrates. Last year San Francisco’s Chinatown had a five-hour long pyrotechnic display. 

San Francisco boasts the biggest Chinese New Year parade outside of Asia–a tradition since the gold rush days. And it’s not a solo act; every town around the Bay Area has its own Lunar New Year spectacle. We Sonoma County residents have a menu of celebrations to choose from.

Lunar New Year coincides with the pagan holiday Imbolc, heralding the start of spring. Here in northern California, February feels like the real New Year’s kickoff. Signs of spring are everywhere – blossoming trees, early flowers showing off. In December, as a solstice ritual, I planted hyacinths and tulips in our drought tolerant front yard. These bulbs do their thing in rainy spring, no watering needed. They will soon bloom. Right now, in the midst of an atmospheric river of rain, our daffodils are in full bloom.

While we won’t be setting off fireworks, there are many parts of this celebration we like to adopt.

In China everyone takes the first day of Lunar New Year off work. I wish I’d known this when I was still working. For retirees, I guess it’s a day to do whatever we feel like (much like every other day).

There is lots of feasting and we can totally get into that. I look forward to eating Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean food!

In the week before the new year, cleaning house takes priority, sweeping away any ill fortune and making way for incoming good luck. The Goddess of the Garage beckons us for a spring cleaning extravaganza.

And we will not forget the household deities traditionally honored at New Years–a nod to the Kitchen Witch and a shout-out to the Garden Goddess. It’s time to get the garden ready for spring planting.

This year I’m following MeiBeck’s example and queering the tradition of the red envelope. I found envelopes, Chinese lanterns and new year’s candy at the World Market. Now I just have to find $2 bills. There aren’t many in circulation but the U.S. government mint still prints them. I’ll give them to friends who, like me, are queer as a two-dollar bill.

However you celebrate, we wish you a Happy New Year.

Love, Molly (and Holly)

Good Imbolc, Happy New Year!

My Regular Pagan Holiday Greeting: Imbolc

Posted on Solstices, Equinoxes and Cross Quarter Holidays

Dear Friends,

Imbolc, the Celtic pagan holiday on February 1, and the time of the Lunar New Year really mark the advent of spring in California, at least here in Sonoma County. The daffodils I planted in November are in full bloom. Just before a series of atmospheric rivers dumped 18 inches of rain (about three times the normal rainfall), we installed a water catchment system with swales in the front yard and three 1000-gallon tanks. Our system worked well to save water for future irrigation and to direct it away from the house. The January rains filled creeks to overflowing and greened the grass, although storms also felled many trees and resulted in flooding and some deaths. 

The earth is turning and the light is returning, but it’s still dark at 5 AM when I go out to look for the comet called ZTF. I haven’t been able to see it yet, but skies have been clear lately and I keep trying. The comet can be found in the north sky between the north star and the big dipper. It will be closest to Earth on February 2. It’s green! Perhaps a sign? 

A bit of angst seizes me whenever I look up for the comet. I can’t help thinking about the movie Don’t Look Up. We watched it again recently and it was just as hilarious and sobering as the first time. If you haven’t seen this movie yet, you must! It’s a metaphor for climate change that hits us over the head hard, but lately I’m thinking nothing can be too un-subtle for us humans. (My friends, I’m not talking about you. I know you are aware and doing all you can do to avert the predicted climate disaster).

Every day, as the green comet comes closer, I’ve looked for it with binoculars, but it keeps eluding me. So we bought a telescope. I found two telescopes in town–an inexpensive one at a sporting goods store and a more expensive one at a camera store. I’m new at this so figured the cheaper one would be just fine. We brought it home and tried to figure out how to use it. It seemed so simple. We followed the spare directions but failed to make it work. We tried and tried. The manufacturer didn’t have decent assembly instructions. So we looked online for videos and found one in Spanish, but as neither of us understands the language (a failing I’ve always regretted) we didn’t really get it. Plus, to set the focus each time you have to bend over in a way that my old neck will no longer allow. 

So I boxed the telescope back up and returned it. Then we bought the expensive one. This thoroughly modern telescope was made in France and must be connected to wifi and a computerized device. Directions say we can have as many as ten devices so we imagine we can host star watching parties where all the guests could see the comet, or the moon, or planets on their ipads. That’s the fantasy anyway. Still is. 

We were directed to connect to the manufacturer’s wifi network, which didn’t come up on my phone. Later I was able to log on but couldn’t figure out the next step. Instructions are not terribly helpful. Are they translated? Or are we just too old to understand? Normally this tech breakdown would have me throwing up my hands in despair. But my wife Holly is kind of a tech wizard (witch?) and I depend on her to solve these problems. She couldn’t, but she is sanguine and so I haven’t lost hope that we can figure it out. Maybe I’ll see the green comet yet. It won’t be back around again for 50,000 years. I just can’t wait that long.

Aside from my unfulfilled obsession with the comet, life is good for us in Santa Rosa. We are thankful for our good fortune, but at the same time we are anguished by the growing wealth gap and the failure of our society to care for those more needy than we. The capitalist system values nothing as much as making (or stealing) money, assigning those with other priorities to the losers column.

My angst is multiplied by the recent explosion of gun violence especially in the past couple of weeks. California, with the strictest gun laws in the country, experienced some of the worst violence. We lesbian feminists laugh (and cry) about testosterone poisoning, and I do think that simple theory has some truth to it. Systems breakdowns and our society’s failure to prioritize the common good contribute. Gun violence has worsened with the proliferation of guns, but it has been going on for a long time. January 30 is the 75thanniversary of the shooting death of Mahatma Ghandi.

I support taking away the guns. That’s what Cheryl Wheeler sang. Her song, If It Were Up to Me, was written after the Stockton school shooting in 1989 and it still applies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op7agdIFOGY

If you don’t know Cheryl Wheeler, check her out. She writes funny songs too. My Cat’s Birthday comes to mind. We lesbians do love our cats.

Sending wishes for peace in the new year.

Love, Molly and Holly (MoHo)