Celebrating Litha 2018!

We had such a lovely Litha (Summer Solstice) this year! As usual, our celebrations lasted for several days and I have lots of photos to share. We started out by making vegan clover honee a week in advance, and I wrote a post about getting ready for Litha.

We started celebrating the afternoon before the Solstice, and I already shared a post about our Midsummer’s Eve. The highlights were preparing an offering for the fairies, watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and watching the sunrise at Stonehenge live online. Here is our tray for the fairies:

On Litha, we got up early to watch the Solstice sunrise. It was quite cloudy, but still beautiful!

Then, we went to collect our tray and tea set. The fairies must have had a raucous party because this is what we found! We did find all but the teapot lid scattered around in the grass and under the plants, but it took awhile!

We saw the mother and father robins that come to build a nest in our yard every year:

Here are their three babies in their nest on top of our porch light (we don’t turn the light on while the robins are nesting):

We gathered wildflowers and lavender that we will dry and use soon to make vegan Lughnasadh honee:

We wrote intentions on water bottles and put them out to charge in the Solstice sun with some other things I wanted to imbue with the sun’s energy:

Then, I made bread dough for later and assorted doughnuts for a special treat!

My mom and I shaped the dough I had made earlier into a Picasso-inspired sun bread:

While the bread was baking, we had a light lunch of celery and peanut butter:

Our sun bread turned out great!

We had bought some pea shoots at our local farmer’s market a few days earlier, and we got them out and harvested them to use in a salad for dinner:

We put homemade vegan ranch dressing on our salad:

We cut our chunks of bread in half, spread them with a little vegan butter, and added slices of vegan Daiya farmhouse block-style cheddar cheese!

It had started to rain in the early afternoon, and it was still raining in the evening, so our plans for a bonfire were literally rained out:

So we created a sunny peach tart inside instead!

It was delicious with a scoop of vegan vanilla ice cream!

A couple of days later, we had a Litha picnic with some other members of our group, Vegan Pagans of Ohio!

Matthew brought his adorable dogs, Star and Princess!

Kim and Steve came too and we really enjoyed hearing about all their rescue animals!

We all brought lots of food, so we had a fabulous spread!

My mom took this photo!

Everything was so good!

After lunch, we went for a walk in the beautiful park:

We got home and watched a gorgeous sunset:

Kim gave me some mulberries from her yard at the picnic, and I used them the next morning to make these jumbo muffins! They were wonderful and a perfect ending to our Litha celebration!