Blue Moon Celebrations

Every full moon for about 5 years (with a short restructuring hiatus last year), I have been having an open celebration. A time and space for people I know and some I don't to come together and be. At first I did it on the Full Moon exactly, regardless of which day of the week it fell on. After several years it grew stale and I called an end to it. I tried a straight salon structure, trying to make it more about the commerce of ideas and inspiration rather than pure fellowship, but that was too focused. I finally settled on the current template, which is the Saturday before the Full Moon but flexible about holidays, with the extended hours of the salon to make it more accessible for people with kids, and a loose combination of salon and fellowship. We have now added a Marketplace for crafters in the community to share their wares and for giveaways to get distributed into the community first before getting dropped off at the thrift store.

I have this down to a science. It takes an hour or less for setup and maybe a half hour for clean up. I have built an email invite list of about 70 people, and the celebrations average 20-30 people in actual attendance. I always hope to see new faces and meet cool new people, and that has happened with every celebration for the past 6 months or more.

But I am skipping Blue Moon, which is today, the 31st. Today is the second Full Moon in the month of December, making it a Blue Moon. It is also a lunar eclipse and the Conventional Calendar's New Years Eve. Currently Mercury is in retrograde, as is Mars. It is a big day astrologically.

Normally I would have a huge celebration, try to get everyone to come out. But I do not want to fight for New Years (I myself will be attending two shindigs with two different circles of friends) and I did just have my own personal holiday party a couple days after Yule, which was less than 3 weeks from the first Dec Moon. That's a lot of celebrations. And I tend to take a rather Mayan view of these last days of the year. For them, there were 5 dead days at the end of their year to round out their calendar. On those days, you were supposed to lay low and hope the gods didn't notice you.

I like that thought. These are some of the darkest, least structured, most mysterious days and nights of the year, even for modern Christian society. For me, they are about contemplating what I want and envision for the coming year and coming to terms with what just happened in the passing year. I will acknowledge the Conventional New Year and the Blue Moon by celebrating with my friends, and the Mayan calendar by resting and being contemplative (and not having my own celebration).