Happy Spring!

Hello, solarpunks! And HAPPY SPRING. Woot! Woot! It’s finally here!

This year, it feels like the ancient Persian tradition of Nowruz are everywhere. Or, at least, it feels like they’ve popped up this week in every online news service I peruse. As have articles filled with top tips for spring cleaning. Meanwhile, although Passover is still a month away, Easter is coming up fast.

All of this has me wondering, how do I want to mark the Sun’s having crossed the Equator? How do I want to bid briefly goodbye to winter, and pat myself on the back for surviving that duration which, where I’m living now, is so grey, wet, chilly, muddy, flooded, and miserable?

I’ve also been wondering how a solarpunk community might celebrate the return of the green, fecund, and growing time of the year. Because what could be more solarpunk than a big party with feasting, music, dancing, bunnies, community, hope, rebirth, and love?! Or, how would people in general celebrate spring in a future where people value what’s good and spiritually moving about traditions but shun the aspects of organized religion that are dangerous, repressive, abusive, racist, misogynistic, controlling, and patriarchal?

It’s kind of weird growing up on the secular periphery of Easter/Passover. I feel like it’s one of my favorite holidays and yet, I don’t quite know what to do with it. Having not ever been Christian, I don’t feel the need to celebrate the resurrection of a martyr who means nothing to me. How can I be thankful for being saved from my sins if I can’t even grasp the concept of sin! (It is possible to be as moral as just about everyone else without feeling like there are such things as sins.) Not having been raised in any religious tradition, nor do I feel the urge to engage in a rite to protect my household from evil or witchcraft, nor do I feel the need to celebrate the Exodus, even though, through the murdered segment of my family that I never met, I almost certainly had ancestors who took part in it.

But spring! I love spring! And I do want to welcome it back. So, I’m all for ditching the moveable feast aspect of Easter and Passover, pegging the celebration of spring to the vernal equinox. This just makes sense and it returns the festival back to its pre-Christian and pre-Judean roots. Not that I’m any sort of practitioner of a pagan religion. And not there needs to be an originalist observation of the spring celebration. It’s just that I personally feel more connection to the astronomical and ecological aspects of the celebration than the theological ones. I also think adding a spring celebration on the vernal equinox would include everyone while simultaneously not precluding anyone from having a religious observation of Easter or Passover. It does overlap with Nowruz, but that wouldn’t need to be a problem. If people are already celebrating on the equinox, I say, keep it up!

In addition to just the plain old idea of a Welcome Back, Spring! celebration, I’m also personally totally for the colorfully dyed or hand painted hard boiled eggs, chocolate eggs, chocolate bunnies, panoramic sugar eggs, jelly beans, and marshmallow chicks (and marshmallow chick art) aspect of the Celebration of the Arrival of Spring (but, egads, we need to come up with a better name for the celebration). I’m also totally for a big bunny bringing that basket of sweets and hiding brightly dyed eggs in the backyard. I’d even be fine with replacing it with a gigantic hen. I must, however, say non to the the blessed, flying, chocolate dropping church bells the French went for because a bunny was just not Catholic enough.

Another tradition that I know and love is the Germanic/Northern European burning of an Easter bonfire, even if all that smoke gives me asthma and you have to be careful not to roast hedgehogs or bunnies. That being said, though, these huge bonfires, held the night or two before Easter, are now more about beer and sausages, chatting with the neighbors, and getting rid of all the debris you trimmed off your garden’s bushes and trees during winter than a deeply moving mystical celebration of the arrival of spring. Still, that’s not too many steps away from drinking alcohol and dancing wildly around a bonfire in order to banish winter and welcoming spring.

I also love the Germanic/Northern European tradition of hanging colorful eggs (these days made of paper or plastic) on a tree for a few weeks before Easter. And I love the Slavic tradition of intricately dyeing eggshells (although blowing the innards out of the eggs is a good way to make yourself dizzy—or perhaps I need to work on my technique).

Our meager stab at an Ostereierbaum.

And spring cleaning of your home and relationships, as I’ve heard is a part of Nowruz, also sounds super to mark the end of winter and the beginning of spring. Free your life of dirt and clutter! Wash the windows to improve your view! And make true amends to your friends and family for the niggles and failings of the past year so you may start anew with a tidier slate.

And the aspect of all of these celebrations like Easter, Passover, and Nowruz that involves bringing loved ones together to partake in a feast after the long months of winter darkness and perhaps also fasting sounds like the wisest, most wonderful part of a spring celebration.

If I was a part of a real life solarpunk community, or if I had a family that was amenable to altering their own traditions, those are the aspects of the celebration of spring that I’d weave back together into a new tradition. And I’d mash in a bit of Earth Day as well, celebrating, not just the arrival of spring, but the start of that year’s greening and growing of ecosystems everywhere (at least in the Northern Hemisphere). The spring celebration would be a time to celebrate new life and new growth in general and the health of, our respect for, and our connection to the natural world.

Okay, though, there are still wrinkles to work out. Like, what about the Southern Hemisphere? We’d have to move the spring celebration away from Easter/Passover and shift it to the austral spring in the Southern Hemisphere. And I’m not at all sure what a spring celebration would mean for people living in the tropics, which are not terribly seasonal. A spring celebration is definitely more of a higher latitude happening, ecologically speaking, so if you take the Abrahamic religion aspects out, I’m not sure what you’re left with in the tropics to unite people in celebration.

But hang on. I’m getting off track. I’m not trying to invent a new feast for everyone in the world. Just dreaming of how I’d celebrate the arrival of spring with family and friends if I was given free rein. I’d have chocolate, and bunnies, and colorful eggs, and colorful eggs hanging on trees, and a bonfire we’d dance around all night long, and a big feast with family and friends. And spring cleaning (beforehand) and a making of amends to love ones and maybe also to Earth. Because a spring celebration done my way would deeply involve loving and appreciating the Earth whose surface we live on.

But what about you? Comment below! If you could reinvent our celebration of the arrival of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, or start a celebration of the arrival of spring in the Southern Hemisphere, what would you want to include in it? What are your favorite parts of Easter/Passover/Nowruz/etc? Do you come from a family that carves butter lambs or does something similarly spectacular? What do you eat for your feast? Do you dye eggs? Do you paint them? I have so many questions!!! And I’d love to hear all of the things that you do to celebrate Easter, Passover, Nowruz, or anything else along these lines, or what cool ideas you can share from spring celebrations from cultures around the world. And I want to see photos of your Peeps dioramas and your gorgeously dyed eggs and anything else beautiful and breathtaking that you create for your celebration of spring!