Litha 2023

The Wednesday before last was Litha aka Midsummer/the Summer Solstice. I celebrated by making a tomato and onion salad and lemonade (my main celebrations for sabbats are making food and drink). 

The salad recipe is from Soraya's book The Kitchen Witch, although I used both red and white onion for a change. I was going to have some avocado as well to make it similar to the kachumbari (Kenyan tomato and onion salad) that I sometimes make for Beltane), but there wasn't any at the supermarket.

I had the salad for my lunch with ciabatta bread, chicken, cheese and pickle, gherkins, Doritos and dip. The lemonade is "Hello Kitty lemonade (the recipe is from a Hello Kitty book).

The food was quite nice. Here's a picture:  

In the evening I went up to my local nature reserve on a hill for sunset. It was the first time I'd been up there since Samhain last year. I don't tend to go there much over the winter and usually go for Oestara/Ostara aka the Spring Equinox, but I wasn't able to this year.

It was quite a nice sunset. Here are a couple of photos: 

Sunset on Mill Hill, Shoreham-by-sea.

I also filmed a YouTube short. I have been doing them on or around  sabbats, but I keep forgetting to share them in these posts! (I actually wrote the same thing last year, about forgetting to link them!) So here is the one I filmed on Litha/the Summer Solstice: https://youtube.com/shorts/JQZsDBHapuI?feature=share

When I got back I lit a white candle, since Litha is a fire festival and the longest day of the year. I thought I had a yellow candle left over from before (a good colour to symbolise the sun), but I didn't, so used white instead.  Here's a pic: 

Something got on the lens but it gives a nice effect!

So now we're "officially" in summer!  It's my favourite season. As I said in my Shifting into Summer post, I like the increased light at this time of year. Although we'll now see the days start to shorten slightly, they will still be quite long for a while yet.

There next sabbat will be Lammas on 1st August (one of my favourites). And then we'll be moving towards autumn! I'll do a post about my celebrations.

Hope you had a good Litha and Happy Summer! (Or hope you had a good Yule and Happy Winter!) :)