Our grove celebrates the Druid Moons (6th night after the new moon) with a ritual each month. The ones we celebrate are Gaulish, and each one has a different focus and a different working. My favorite of them as a priest is definitely Anagantios (or Stay at Home month). This is the Druid Moon where instead of everyone gathering at our normal ritual site and participating in a typical ritual we instead have all the folk stay at home and the priests travel from home to home and bless houses. Not everyone wants to have visitors, and that’s okay, but we make an effort to travel to everyone in our grove who would like a house blessing at some point during the day that works for them. The weeks leading up to it are spent gathering addresses and times available so that we can plot out our route. We try to group similar locations together, but always end up kind of zipping around the city since certain people are only available at certain times. We always end up with a crazier looking route when the moon falls on a week day, since we do a lot of blessings both before and after people are at work.

The first stop of the day is always at the Grove Member’s house who keeps our Brigid Flame. We stop by there first to collect the flame, and then the blessings can begin. When we enter each house we take off our shoes and relight the lantern that has been freshly lit from the Brigid Flame (traveling with an open flame is ill-advised). Then we travel to each room in the house and bless it from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, and in all the cracks and crevices. When we come to a door to the outside we bless the threshold with holy waters so that all who enter in welcome are blessed with joy and hospitality. The Anagantios blessing is similar to the house blessing I typically do when I’m asked to do a personal one, though it is a bit shorter and more streamlined. We’re normally in and out in under 15 minutes (and that’s for a really big house). Typically Rev. Dangler and I trade off who does the fire blessing and who does the water blessing, though when we get to our houses the other will do both so we’re not blessing our own house.

This year we spent 12.5 hours, traveled 163 miles total, and blessed 17 houses. You can see a map of our route above. It was a pretty great and fulfilling day, all in all.

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