Last week in a medium sized shop in the mid latitudes of the British Isles, a human checked along the signs hanging above the aisles, and headed into Seasonal Aisle to buy some wooden fence protector. Imagine the surprise when that aisle contained nothing but chocolate, piled high and low and deep, and in so many boxes and packets and bags and specially made little houses and really eye catching words, designs, colours, bits of glitter, but basically the same ingredients of cocoa mass, cocoa butter, sugar, and milk, give or take a few boxes of dark. And of course, the Season is Christmas.
Last week was August, today the month turns to September, and for us pagans who notice such things, the Autumn Equinox, Alban Elfed, is still three weeks away. Christmas, which does not exist in either Earth, Helios, or the natural world, but certainly does in the western world for the last two thousand years, is still another three calendar months after that, neatly slotted into that most profound time of year when the tiny baby Light of Helios is born again. From today, the seasonal food now taking up a lot of space in all medium to large supermarket type shops in the UK is for a date about four months away = one third of a solar year. That’s a long time.
Outside in the still evidence natural world, the blackberries are large and sweet in sunny patches, and many many more ripening to be there for the picking over the next few weeks. Those who know their mushrooms know what this time of year brings, this human only trusts knowledge of a puffball but there are the mycophagists who know what and where to pick in this liminal seasonal zone where the beautiful and bountiful harvest is given. Nuts and berries, and all the cultivated fruit and vegetables of this climatic zone, and which once upon a time would have been a very busy time of preserving and stewing and pie making and jam making and sloe gin pricking and the primitive pleasure of eating a ripe fruit or vegetable straight off the stalk.
The market, still so much a part of society in much of Europe and especially the Catholic regions of ‘the west’ where supermarkets are still pretty much unchanged over the last few decades appear to exist only to provide what the market really cannot, while the real food goes on in those markets where real food meets real people. Solar time is the definer, the regulator, the arbiter, and like a dial around reality, the market revolves throughout the year, and the work of local producers forms a seamless process through the markets and into the homes of humans who delight in that correlation with ultimately Solar time.
If the government in the ‘UK’ thought about rebalancing the fragmented links between humans and Earth, and from there of food and water, it could pass a law to say every retail outlet apart from the very small, would have a Seasonal aisle, 365 days a year, with local suppliers all having a little stall, like a real old covered market in the fine towns of the mid latitudes, and which are closing year on year, no trolleys allowed down that aisle because there wouldn’t be room, and money paid directly, in cash, to each producer.
Farmers markets we have, and unfortunately have become something of a lifestyle symbol, unfortunate as those rows of stalls really do reflect Solar time, while most just load a trolley in the supermarkets and never would visit a farmers market for all sorts of reasons. If the government mandated, passed a supermarket law, requiring one aisle as a local seasonal produce, with the stall holders paying something to overheads but only a small part because they are not part of the supply chain or fraught relations with their suppliers, because they are the suppliers of their own goods.
Then the seasonal aisle of last week, in August, to encourage a four month buying binge on chocolate before the event of Christmas, would have to rename itself because the real seasonal would be the line up of local produce. It’s a strange situation in the ‘UK’ because to put up a sign saying Christmas aisle in August would have customers startled at the incongruity, even exclaiming Christmas just gets earlier every year, yet that is what it is.
Solar time has no guises, nature has no way of doing anything other than what it is and for the purpose of the life force itself. To be inside the seasons of Helios and completely sustained, or outside in the shiny wrappings of western time, Halloween horrors soon to come, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, summer alcohol discounts, before Christmas appears again, will there be a government able to bridge this existential gap.
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