Hearthside

I have been working on some colouring pages for the Heathen holidays Sigrblót, Midsummer, Winter Nights, and Jól. Just in time for Sigrblót! Please use them for your families or gatherings. All are free to use and share them for non-commercial purposes! For more Heathen resources for practicing Sigrblót with your family I recommend checking out fellow Canadian content creator, Jennifer Hartman at Pagan Kids! She has an excellent blog post about Sigrblót which I will link below. Further Reading "Sigrblót for the Family" by Jennifer Hartman  https://www.pagankids.org/post/sigrblot Image Sources Images are my own and may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes.

I have been spending too much time on TikTok lately. Which is probably a poor use of time, however, occasionally something interesting comes of it. For instance, I recently was just flipping through content and found a song sung by bella.dandrea which is a "Norse Pagan" (for why this is in quotations, read here ) song meant to be sung to your daughter as you are waking her up in the morning. The lyrics are as follows: There once was a little lady Little idel leigh And she stood up tall and proud The drums they are so quiet To the way that her feet pound Freya smiling down Idunn she’s oh so proud Nott so joyous Syf so happy Hamynga dares to grin Hel can’t help but stare The little lady there They all feel so proud Happy little lady found Chorus: Little idel leigh, del leigh, little idel lay Little idel leigh, del leigh, little idel lay Hey! (x2) I thought this was quite beautiful and it sent me down a rabbit hole on heathen lullabies, and what was out there. It will probably ...

Happy Solstice, all! Hope it is treating you well, and Happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there! I actually wrote the text for this blog a few weeks ago, but I felt my last post needed a bit of space before I posted something new. So here goes: My fiancé and I have been talking about starting a family for a long time. Due to the pandemic this plan and many plans within our household have been postponed. This has allowed me more than ample time to think about the household traditions I want to share with our future child. My current job is working with children, and between this and our inter-faith hearth I have been thinking long and hard about what is best when raising a child who is given a mixed spiritual education in hopes that they can make an informed decision about their faith when they are older. It is important to me that my fiancé and I can both share with our child our favourite holidays and traditions from growing up as well as the traditions that we each subscri...

There are a lot of complex issues when talking about children in heathenry in general, and ritual is definitely going to be a main area of contention. Understanding the political landscape of heathenry is key to navigating this. There are several dynamics taking place that make this such a hot topic.  First of all, we cannot escape the folkish element of heathenry and their push to breed to expand heathenry. This seems to cause pushback in inclusive heathenry, where people and groups are hesitant to entertain family friendly ritual at all for fear of being lumped into a folkish category. This is highly problematic, since most religions are inclusive to families. This leads right into our next issue. The religious backgrounds of most of the heathen demographic have shaped their perceptions of family and religion. Many heathens grew up in a landscape where religion was forced upon them, and are hesitant to allow that to happen to the next generation. There are also some concerns that...

There is a lot of bad advice on the internet, and most women are well aware that everyone has an opinion on child-rearing. This does not seem to exclude sites on heathenry unfortunately. If you look for information on raising heathen children on the internet, you are sure to be disappointed. First of all you have to weed through all the instances where the word “heathen” is used in a different context from what you strictly meant. Perhaps, you choose to go the raising pagan children route instead, to see if that improves the content that comes up. You will soon see you are just replacing one unsatisfying result with another. If you do manage to sift through all the stuff that presents very clearly as garbage you still will not like what you find. We are really still at the building stage here with heathenry, and sometimes we just have to bite the bullet and write the rule book ourselves. If heathen women want information about heathenry and child raising, we really need to share our st...