The Holiday Names in Universal Eclectic Wicca

When I composed All One Wicca in its earliest forms, I was quite content to go along with the current common practice of Wicca at the time. In many ways, by putting AOW out there at all, I was making waves. As far as I know, to date, AOW is the sole Wiccan textbook directly teaching only one tradition, and unashamedly so. Since I was making waves already, there were a few things I glossed over rather than make extra waves, things I hope to give more detail to in the revision of All One Wicca due out in 2006.

One of these things was the holiday names. When I first met Jayne Tomas, founder of what would become CUEW, I met her at a May day celebration. The term May day was used, as well as Beltane, and I accepted them both as synonyms without question. On my first schedule of events it listed solstices, equinoxes and four other two day festivals: May Eve and May Day, August Eve and the Sweet Corn Harvest, November Eve and the Day of Remembrance and February Eve and the Feast of the Ice Floes.

Little did I know, neophyte that I was, that these “unique” names for the holidays were actually the older, more established names, and that while the feast days we had the following day were fairly unique to our group, the tradition of calling the holidays May Eve, August Eve, November Eve and February Eve were actually the original technique in Wicca, and the Celtic flavored names for these four holidays were the new tradition, not the old one.

It is because of my own lack of knowledge that I was fast to put the four names more common to Wiccan literature into All One Wicca, and Coven of the Far Flung Net, a decision I actually regret in retrospect, and hope to remedy in the near future.

What I, and others, failed to take into consideration is the fact that these four common names we were using-Beltane, Lughnasa, Samhain and Imbolc-are also the names of Celtic holidays that are not the same as the Wiccan holidays-they often have similarities, and they often occur on the same day, but they are not the same festivals.

It is for this reason that I strongly support a return to the old names, and turning away from the Celtic-flavored ones, and within the CUEW literature produced during my tenure, I will attempt to use the standard old names out of respect for our ancestors and out of respect for the Celts, present and past.

You can call them whatever you wish, at a personal level. CUEW has always been open to variation within the tradition, but from an official standpoint, I am making this minor adjustment and erring on the side of justice.

Kaatryn MacMorgan, President, AUEWC

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