Litha 2025

The Saturday before last it was Litha aka Midsummer/the Summer Solstice (21st June). (Or Sunday 20th depending on your timezone). My usual celebration for this sabbat is making salad and lemonade.

This year I made tomato and onion salad again and "Hello Kitty lemonade" (the recipe is from a Hello Kitty book). I most often use a salad recipe from The Kitchen Witch book by Soraya, but I've lost the book at the moment! I basically remember the recipe anyway, but I also based it on this Italian tomato and onion salad one from This Italian Kitchen: https://thisitaliankitchen.com/italian-tomato-onion-salad/

I came across the recipe a couple of years ago and linked to it in past posts (including last year's Salads for Litha/Summer + Extra Ideas! post. It was the first time I'd made it though.

The salad was quite nice. It's pretty similar to The Kitchen Witch one, except for a couple of things. It uses red onion but I've sometimes made my Litha salad with red onion anyway, which makes it a bit like kachumbari which I like to make for Beltane. Also it requires balsamic vinegar but I didn't have that, so I used lemon juice instead (I think my normal recipe has lemon juice in). And if I don't have olive oil (which I didn't this time) I use vegetable oil instead.

I had it for lunch with a Fitzgeralds bake at home sourdough baguette, sea salt and vinegar crisps, gucamole, chicken fillets and roasted garlic and aioli potato salad. Also the lemonade. Here are a couple of pics:

 

Food

Lemonade

In the evening, I went to Hove Park for sunset. I've been doing that for some sabbats in recent months, because it's easier for me to get there than to my local nature reserve on a hill (which I like to go to for festivals in the spring/summer months including Litha), due to current circumstances. 

I haven't been going on my weekly parks in the past couple of years but last year I started going to Hove Park for some sabbats. It's actually a year since I went to Hove Park for Litha, after not going there for a while.  

It was quite a nice sunset that evening. It was one of the hottest days so far, about 27C (80F), I think. (Similar to last year.) I took some pictures, then went to Burger King and got a latte, Coke and a double bacon cheeseburger, and came back and sat in the park. Here are a couple of photos:

Sunset in Hove Park.

 

 

When I got back, I lit a white candle, since Litha is a fire festival and the longest day of the year. Here's a picture:

 

Back in 2017, I wrote in my Litha post that in the past year or so I'd been expanding my practice of celebrating the sabbats, such as lighting candles, reflecting on where I am currently and doing rituals. That was 8 years ago now! That Litha I also went to Hove Park. 

So now we're "officially" in summer! The weather has been varied during spring and into the start of summer. As I wrote in this year's Beltane post, we had a lot of sun during April and it was hotter at the end of the month. There was some hotter weather in May and June but it was also cooler and rainy at some points. And then towards the end of the month it was quite hot.

A heatwave was forecast for this weekend and Monday in the southern half of the UK. It's actually been cooler here in Sussex than last weekend, about 24C (75F), although it's supposed to get up to 28C (82F) later this week.

The next sabbat is Lammas (one of my favourites!) on 1st August and I'll do a post about my celebrations. I'm also planning to write my spring-summer update soon.

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