At Long Last: The Promises of My Weird Druidic Calendar

PLUS: How to throw a birthday party for a 2-year-old

A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day

My Dear Friend,

It’s been a year since I told you I invented a calendar. I wrote then:

I was listening to the book “Wintering” by Katherine May, and she wrote about how she went to Stone Henge one time to “turn the year” during the solstice. Then she interviewed someone familiar with Druidic traditions, and that guy explained that the druids celebrate something eight times a year, which means that there’s something to look forward to roughly every six weeks, and that that’s just the right amount of time to have to look forward to something. And I thought, “Huh. That’s right!”

Here’s the calendar I whipped up:

I wrote that I would start that week by collecting leaves, and that by next year (by this year), maybe I’d be having people over to celebrate leaves together. I pictured making rubbings of leaves and having some kind of leafy food.

I look back at that shiny optimism and I’m weary. Hosting used to make me so joyful — but that was before I had a toddler. And for everything I’ve written and said to others about modeling Not Caring About What Other People Think, there have been a few times recently when I’ve had people come to my house — a place I really love and used to feel sort of proud of — and have heard them say, “Wow, it’s really obvious that a toddler lives here,” and it’s crushed me. I mean, you know, that’s not a bad thing. A toddler does live here. She actually makes kind of amazing and avant-garde decorative choices. She’s an arranger. But still, people come over and see “mess.” They might see “happy mess,” or “mess that means that a kid is enjoying their time,” or “mess that means that life is being joyfully lived,” but they are seeing mess. This makes hosting harder.

And so the purpose of my six-week celebration calendar — which was intended to implement some regular and clearly directed rest — wouldn’t have benefited from hosting a leaf-rubbing ceremony, or whatever.

I pictured having clear traditions that would come to mark these calendar weeks. Fires, special meals, outings. There would be things to look forward to every year. But the paradox of celebrations is that in order to have them (to theoretically actively rest through them), you have to plan and work. You have to set everything up! You have to get the dominos in order so that you can knock them over — and then after that, you have to clean the floor again.

Nevertheless, every six weeks, I took a break from writing to you, and with that time, I did something different. I am here now to report back.

December 20: Fire & Ice

I was eager to make my calendar work. I’d wanted to have a bonfire, ideally in the middle of an ice storm (?!?!). On December 20, it was icy; but I couldn’t wrangle anyone to come over for a fire. I did, however, get a whole bunch of people to come to our house to sing Christmas carols and exchange holiday cookies. I feel very, very strongly about singing in unison, and I had decided that if there was one energy I could bring to my house during the year-turning season, it would be singing-altogether. (PS - there is is science about this! Singing in a choir improves people’s health and happiness.) My vision of being a True Druid and standing outside in the deep cold while chanting around a fire wasn’t meant to be, but it still felt like a good-enough celebration. And also, Kat and I traditionally have a bonfire on New Years’ Day anyway, so I knew that one was coming.

February 2: Roots (Groundhogs)

Since this was my calendar and I got to do whatever I wanted with it, I bent it so that Groundhog Day would be centered. If you know anything about me in real life, you know that Groundhog Day is my favorite holiday, and that this is one of my most central and personal life beliefs. This year marked the return of our in-person Groundhog Day Cookie Decorating Party, after a few rounds of remote cookie-ing.

(I’m noticing that this has been a lot of winter cookies, and I’m wondering if I need to rethink my reliance on cookies for celebrations. Am I overthinking this? I like cookies because of their ease. They are easy to make and easy to eat and hard to get wrong. On the other hand, I am distrustful of the ways in which sugar tricks people into thinking winter does not require A LOT MORE SLEEP. I will need to think about this.)

March 20: Flowers

We did two big things to celebrate this holiday.

The first one was that Luke built a bean arch.

The second one was that we went out for a VERY fancy dinner and got a whole tasting menu. I got the wine pairing. It’s hard to know if it’s the right move to get the wine pairing. They should have an option where you can get, like, two wines that have been paired. Because definitely by the third dish (out of seven), I was drunk. And by the seventh dish, I couldn’t tell you if it was as amazing as it seemed like it was. It probably was, BUT WHO CAN KNOW!? I made Luke taste everything I got (our tasting menus were different; mine was vegan, and he didn’t have wine), and he said it was all “really good,” but he’s just such a nice guy. He doesn’t even say anything disparaging about our mean plumber.

QUITE drunk in this picture. Is this plate of what appears to be green smudges as good as it seemed like it was? Luke says, “Yes.”

Two takeaways here: The first one is that there are actually not all that many flowers in March in Chicago. You have to really worship the ones that there are, which are snowdrops and hyacinths. If you don’t like those ones, you’re out of luck. Also, it is going to snow a bunch more times in March, and that’s tough. The second one is that the fancy dinner was a GREAT way to celebrate one of these week-holidays. It was easy and felt special and required no cleanup. I taped the take-home menu in my diary, and I’ll never forget that night, ever.

May 5: Birds

For people who live in states where migration is an annual occurrence, this is the best of the holiday-weeks. Since it is also Luke’s birthday week (and they happened to cancel T’s daycare this week, for reasons that we don’t actually know), I really and truly did take the whole week off to look at birds. We went twice to Montrose Point, and on May 5, I got the three of us matching bird t-shirts. The birds are already having a party, so you don’t have to do any extra work to host; they’re doing everything! Just bring your binoculars and show up early in the morning (I guess you can also bring scones) to a place where the birds are, and watch them. And it’s free! On May 5, we went from looking at, like, 65 species of bird to get breakfast, and they made T a pancake in the shape of a bear, and IT WAS FREE.

Honeybear Cafe, Rogers Park.

June 20: Sun

This is the summer solstice — the longest day of the year. By this time in my Druidic Calendar Experimentation, I’d grown a little fatigued. For one thing, I had a terrible June. Epically bad. I felt like I couldn’t take time off. But on this day, I met Kat downtown and we went to see Hadestown; and the next day was T’s best friend M’s birthday, and we went to the aquarium. And also, I got my hair cut. None of these things had to do with the sun, but I do remember it being very hot one of these days. I want to tell you that I was thinking clearly about resting and celebrating, but I was just surviving. These events happened to happen, and they were nice.

July 31: Water

By this point, I’d totally given up on having group celebrations. But Luke and T and I did walk down to the water. The lifeguard said, “Hey, I’m not allowed to let you swim. And that beach right next to us is a private beach, so you can’t swim there either. But in between this beach and that beach is a sliver beach that belongs to no one. It is neither private nor public. It doesn’t exist. And I can’t tell you anything when you’re on that beach.” The Loophole Beach, is what we call it now.

September 20: Vegetables

When I remade the calendar for 2024 (which I have, by the way), I changed this to “harvest.” September 20 is the fall equinox. The yard has probably passed peak abundance, but maybe there are lots of things left. This year, I went into our yard and I cut down all the basil, which equaled a hundred tons of basil, and the kale and the tomatoes that were still left, and I made bruschetta and pesto that I thought would last forever but was so good it only lasted four days. Nothing made this day different except the wanton nature with which I took down the basil. I decided I would have it all. Oh, and I took the beans too. And I cut FLOWERS. Not Leonard, our short-term roommate and now lifelong friend, was here by then, and he had the Harvest Meal with us. I don’t think I adequately explained about the holiday calendar, but who cares when there’s a feast on the table? It did help that there was one extra person.

So here’s the question: how do you get a few extra people, but not make it stressful for yourself? How do you figure out how to gather without the work? How do you make the gathering a kind of rest? Finding the answer to this question is probably my life’s purpose.

And then also, we had a fire. I invited Kat, but she was sick; Not Leonard came to the fire, and we made One Last S’mores, and I put on the fall playlist and was sufficiently melancholy. This marked the end of summer. This was when I turn the year.

October 31: Leaves

I almost forgot about Leaves Week. I have been drowning. Drowning is a good time to look at a calendar and realize there is a life preserver in the form of a made-up holiday that you invented just for yourself called Leaves Week. Tuesday was Halloween, and we all dressed like owls. I berated myself for spending such a long time making family costumes. This was not a feminist thing to do, I kept muttering, while I sat at the sewing machine and my husband was at his soccer game or eating his salami, not helping me make the family costumes. His input had been that he wanted to be a purple owl, for which I punished him by giving his costume a weird scaly owl neck. I decided I didn’t care. If he had wanted to be a different kind of purple owl, he could have figured this costume out himself. Instead, the costume fell into his lap, like so many things in his life do, and of course it looked very cool on him, who cared about the neck. Then on Sunday, T turned two. Between Owl Halloween and T’s birthday, I drowned more. There was party planning to do, but also a trillion other things. Nothing had slowed down. Luckily, on Thursday, on the way home from the park, T picked up a cardinal-red maple leaf and gave it to me, as in, “Hello Mother. Did you forget about Leaves Week?” I had forgotten, and I was moved. Then she got distracted by something plastic that had probably been in someone else’s mouth, which she wanted to put in her mouth. It’s really obvious that a toddler lives here.

-

Look: it’s been a hard year. I have been keeping a mood log for the past 1,611 days (because I have a tendency to mistrust my lived experience, and believe that I must be misstating things when I say, “Wow, I think I’ve been sad for longer than normal,” or, “I don’t think I’m nearly as universally sad as people in my life imply that I am,” so I need data to back up my observations), and I can tell you for a fact that I’ve been having a harder time this year for much longer than normal. In data points, my mood is an average of 1.8 points lower than it has been for the previous four years. This is significant. Nevertheless, the “celebration calendar” has been a help and not a hindrance.

Here are my takeaways:

• It strikes me as actually deeply human to need to rotate one’s life a little every six weeks or so. The seasons seem to move at about this rate, as much as we act like we live on a planet divided into yearly quarters. If it were really quarters, then the plants in August wouldn’t be so dramatically different than the ones in June; nor the quality of the air.

• Having the week marked on the calendar is enough. You don’t have to plan any further in advance than that. Maybe you have more than enough stuff going on in your life. Let this be an opportunity to have LESS stuff for a week. Take stock. Look around. Cancel some things. Take notes.

• To celebrate every six weeks, the most critical thing is probably to have something good to eat, that you pay attention to while you eat it. Most food can be celebration food if you aren’t multitasking with it.

• I’m a teacher so I couldn’t take work off during the weeks that I had on my celebration calendar. I could, however, build my classes around rest, conversation, and Something A Little Different. I could bring an art project for us to do while we listened to music. I could offer extensions in honor of Leaves Week. If you have some amount of power, consider this.

• Tradition doesn’t have to be about consuming something, or about repeating an activity the same way every year. It doesn’t even have to be about ritual. A tradition is just the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation. If you grimace or come up short when someone asks, “What is your family’s culture?” you are allowed to build one. Maybe build one around principles of love, peace, care, and softness.

If you want to copy my calendar, I’m selling a paper version this year. See “Housekeeping.”

Maybe next year will be better. Maybe it won’t be. Is this stoicism? It’s possible that “celebration” is just another word for “prayer.” I hope you’ll let these calendar-ideas open up new possibilities for you.

And good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.

Love,

Sophie

How To… Throw A Birthday Party for A Two-Year-Old

I don’t really know how to do this, although I guess we did it.

I did interview a lot of people in the lead-up to the birthday party for the to-be two-year-old. I checked Reddit and Quora. It’s ideal if your child has an outdoor-month birthday, because the right thing to do is have the party at a playground, since two-year-olds like playgrounds, and adults can stand around and talk while they watch the two-year-olds, and the playground is free. Our friends with a child who has roughly the same birthday as T banked on it still being warm enough to go to a playground on November 4, and they were right, but for the record, three days earlier it had been like 25 degrees. It’s too much for me for these elements to be this far out of my control. So I was like, I’ll throw this party in my house. And that was kind of as far as I got with it, and I basically sulked and panicked and tried not to really invite anyone. (If you’re reading this and you’re thinking, “Why wasn’t I invited to this birthday party?” It’s because truly no one was, and I only told people who I encountered in real life and who said, “What are you doing for T’s birthday?”)

So what makes me qualified to tell you how to do this? THE FACT THAT THERE IS NO WAY TO DO THIS. This is not a thing you can really do well. I guess the glass-half-full version of that sentence is that this is not a thing you can really do poorly, either. This is just not that much of a thing. Here are all the points:

1. This party is only for the adults. Don’t kid yourself.

   1. ALTHOUGH, T figured out that it was her birthday and that this meant something at about 4:46 p.m. It was evident. She became a monster. She shoved another kid out of a cardboard playhouse, grabbed a piece of cake off a pregnant woman’s plate, shoved the whole thing into her mouth, and DEMANDED PRESENTS BE OPENED. It was about the funniest thing I’d ever witnessed in actual life. Too Much Birthday.

2. The theme that we went with, that our playground-birthday-having neighbors ALSO went with, was Pizza and Cats. Ours devolved into Pizza. At both parties, there were cat ears for people to wear, and this was a great idea. That way, in the photos, you can tell that it was An Event.

3. Make enough open space for the children to play with toys. We moved the shoe rack and the bulky easel. Then just take out the toys.

4. T went to another two-year-old party where there was Play-Doh. I was mad that this party came first, because that was a brilliant idea.

5. Two hours was almost too long.

6. BALLOONS.

7. MORE BALLOONS.

8. FILL THE PLACE WITH BALLOONS!!!!!!!!

9. The Playground Birthday Party Family invited everyone, and asked that there be no presents. That was smart. I felt overwhelmed by the presents. I think no presents is not a bad idea. Apparently, this is controversial, but why? She’s two. She doesn’t know what a present is.

10. On the other hand, the presents were new toys for the kids to play with.

11. Have bananas.

12. Have fruit snacks.

13. Remember that most two-year-olds dislike sparkling water and get some of those organic juice boxes that you probably never had in your house growing up. (Did you?)

GOOD LUCK!

Housekeeping:

• Sammi and I had a cartoon in last week’s New Yorker (one of my favorites):

• This year, I’m selling a calendar. I wanted to make one for myself, and then I thought, I’ll sell one. I made some prototypes and decided the paper was too big and the date boxes were too small, but this is still the idea of it:

Pardon the terrible photography. It was late. The lights were bad. But… Lynda Barry stamps?

I’m going to only print as many as there are pre-orders (because they are expensive and kind of hard to make), and then I’ll print them over the Thanksgiving Break. If you want one, order one! They’ll ship right after Black Friday. I’ll also have a discount code for said calendar for people who pay for their subscriptions! So you can do that!

Loose Thoughts:

• The leaves do different things every year.

• A crew went to see a gender-swapped performance of Company — which I thought was about a theatre company, and Luke thought was about a business company, and was actually about “two’s company,” because Sondheim. There were many good songs in it. It’s about marriage. But it seemed like some of the couples in the play had babies (?), but they still could, like, go to these really late parties as couples? And they only talked about whether one of them was too square or how they worshiped each other while also regretting getting married while also of course NOT regretting it? THEY HAVE BABIES! Don’t we feel like … they would be talking about … domestic labor? Raising the kids? The kids seemed to always be asleep? And never actually discussed, but sort of occasionally mentioned?

• The darker days will be playing tricks on you. They’ll be like, “Oooooh, everything is NORMAL. You feeling bad is ABNORMAL, and has nothing to do with ME, the DARKNESS, which, combined with life under capitalism, is very hard for your body. I mean, HAHAHAHAHAHA THIS IS ALL YOUR OWN FAULT, DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME — THE DARKNESS.”

• I hope you can do less.