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Nutting Day: Make Your Own Nutella!
Around the middle of September, the nut season starts. Hazelnuts ripen in the hedges, and they have long been connected to folklore and legends. Hazel is associated to the Celtic tree month of Coll, from August 5 to September 1, and the very word Coll means “the life force inside you.” Hazelnuts are connected to wisdom and protection, and are often found near sacred wells and magical springs. Hazelnuts can be used in workings related to divination and dowsing – tie a ripe one onto a string and use it as a pendulum! In the British Isles, September 14 was the day when children would forage in the woods to…
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The Tradition of Nut Crack Night
For modern Pagans today, divination is something for which we have practically unlimited tools. We have Tarot cards, scrying mirrors, runes, and all kinds of other goodies. However, for our ancestors, things weren’t quite so simple. Early divination was often done using only the items at hand — sticks, vegetable peels, cloud formations, etc. Around the end of the harvest season, there wasn’t often much left in the fields. However, nuts were often plentiful. Pecans, chestnuts, filberts and more would have been gathered up in baskets and stored, which made them the perfect medium for late fall divination. This is a similar celebration to Nutting Day, which falls in mid-September.…
