I was one of 3 people, each from different paths, who performed a ritual of their path at a funeral. I wore my religious robes and brought a drinking horn to perform a traditional sumbel toast.

so this is Christmas / and what have you done
another year over / a new one just begun

Christmas Eve was always a favorite of mine when I was a kid.  We’d eat sloppy joes, go to church, open presents, enjoy hot chocolate from the machine at the gas station, and look at holiday lights.  (Yes, we opened presents on Christmas Eve.  Santa brings presents for you to open on Christmas Day, duh!)  One of my family’s favorite memories is when I came home from my first semester of college.  My mom was in nursing school at the time and busy working at the hospital that night.  I borrowed the old station wagon and took my sisters and their friends out to look at lights.  We might have listed to John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” 1,000,000 times that evening.  My sisters still tease me about my annoying obsession with this Christmas song (but I won’t let them forget how they mixed up the sugar and salt for the cookies that year.)

The mainstream current of modern Paganism has made much of celebrating “Ancient Ways” and “Old Gods”. This creates an inherent tension between old (or putatively old) practices and beliefs and the innovations and achievements of modernity.

Elements of the broad Pagan umbrella range widely across this expanse. At one pole, you have Reconstructionists, for whom ancient ideas and practices are pretty much everything, and those of other paths who choose to continue to believe (despite much scholarship to the contrary) that today’s Paganism derives from an unbroken lineage of tradition stemming from medieval times or earlier.

It's what cowans call “tradition”: heft.

It's an old word, a Northern word, from the Norse hefð. It's ultimately from the same root as have, heave, and haven, because heft—tradition—is what we have, what we hold and hold to.

It's a noun: both what (and where) we hold to, and those of us hefted—traditioned—thus. So we are our heft. The Driftless Area is our homeland, our heft.

It's a verb: used of a person or people, it means to hold to, to maintain. We heft the Old Ways here.

It's an adjective: hefted, describing those so held; the state of being traditioned, for as we hold heft, so heft holds us.

What’s a Book of Shadows? How do I get one?

Amongst Wiccans and Witches, a book of shadows—often referred to as a BOS—is usually a collection of texts used in rituals, such as ritual scripts and stage directions, poetry and songs, spells, invocations, techniques and teachings, recipes, and sometimes ritual notes or journal entries. These items can be bound in an actual book, written into a blank book, stored in three-ring binders, or kept as Word or PDF files. We use the somewhat old-school “Great Green Three-Ringed Binder of the Arte” because it’s easy to rearrange pages and I don’t want to spill candle wax on a tablet. Everything in our circles seems to end up with wax on it. Some people even choose to write their books in calligraphy to infuse the book with their personal energy.

Types of Books of Shadows

There’s no one right way to keep a BOS, but they tend to fall into one of three categories.

I guide without need of scripture,

for my words are written on the hearts of my people.
 

Muhammad was right.

There are the ahl al-kitâb—the People of the Book—and then there are the pagans.

One of the things that impresses me most about the New Paganisms—and this is one of the ways in which we have remained most true to the ways of the ancestors—is that, from our very beginnings, we have been, and remain, non-scriptural religions. Occasional jokes about Edda-thumping aside (“Snorri said it, I believe it, That settles it”), we have, for the most part, managed to dodge the silver bullet of Canon. In a world in which religions are defined by their scriptures, this is an impressive achievement, rendered all the more striking by the apparently unconscious nature of the decision.