Lammas 2026

The Saturday before last (1st August) it was Lammas. (Although some people may celebrate on 31st July or 2nd August.) I normally celebrate by baking, most often gingerbread. This year I made gingerbread and bread (a mix), like I have for the past couple of years.

The gingerbread recipe is one from BBC Good Food that I've used for the past few years: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/gingerbread_men_99096

I could only find the smaller gingerbread cutter, so I made some "men" shapes and a few round ones too. I made up my own icing (icing sugar mixed with water) which I do most often. I iced some completely. Here's a pic:

The decorating got a bit messy! lol.

 

The bread mix I used was a multiseed bread mix from Tesco. It was quite nice. I had some after I'd baked it and then more the next day with some other food for lunch. Here's a picture:

 

 

I also had some Brothers cider to drink (you can see it a bit in the pictures). Gingerbread, bread and cider all fit the harvest theme of Lammas! :) 

In the evening I went to the park for sunset. I wasn't sure how sunny it was going to be but it turned out to be a nice sunset. Here are a couple of photos: 

View from by Hove Park.

 

Sunset in the park. 

I usually light a candle in the evening too because we're in summer and there's till a lot of light/long days (although you definitely start to notice them shortening at this time) but I forgot to this year! 

So now we're moving towards late summer. It's been a hot summer (and spring too!) this year. As I mentioned in my spring-summer update post, we've just had our 4th heatwave in the UK. A 5th one is forecast for this week. While I like hot weather, we’re not used to it being really hot here! 

The hottest it's been in my area of Sussex is about 31C (87F), so not as hot as some places. In last year's Lammas post, I also mentioned heatwaves. It seems that with global warming/climate change, summers like this will be more common here.

The next sabbat will be Madron aka Mabon/the Autumn Equinox. It's 23rd September this year (or the 22nd US time). I'll write a post about my celebrations. It marks the "official" start of autumn if you go by the astronomical start, although some go by the meteorological one (1st September).

Last year Adriana from YR Studios did an autumn countdown series and I shared it in my Lammas 2025 post. She's also doing one this year so here's the link for the 2026 Autumn Countdown, if you're interested (she considers the stat of autumn to be 1st Sept): https://yrstudio.co.uk/blogs/adriana-tudorache-blog/tagged/autumn-countdown-2026

I hope you had a good Lammas and you're enjoying summer! (Or I hope you had a good Imbolg/Imbolc and you’re enjoying winter!) :)