My holiday season this year is turning out to be the best in the last decade or so.
At first, I couldn’t put my finger on why this one is better, so I sat down and listed what we’ve done, what we didn’t do, and our overall attitude.

Here’s what I discovered that helped make this season joyful:

​Time spent with new and old friends

​Once she arrived, we began walking all three dogs every day. They are joyously happy about the resumption of our fall ritual.
 
We also have been able to include our youngest son and only grandson in our celebrations. That’s always a bonus.
 

Celebration. We made the time for holiday activities to celebrate the season: 

* Writing 25,000 new words during the November NaNoWriMo month of writing. I list this under “celebration” because writing that hard throughout November enabled me to put the book aside for December and get my house ready for holiday guests, normally an extremely stressful activity.

​* Hired a woman to clean house for me a few times. She needed money, I needed time. This is an indulgence I don’t normally partake in, but boy, did it help! Thanks, Jordan!

​* A night listening to The Messiah with the Phoenix Symphony and Chorale, something I’ve wanted to do for 25 years.

* Shopping early, over a few months, thus giving myself the time to wrap presents and enjoy the process.

​No, I am NOT a happy Dec. 24th prep person. I want time to spend several evenings gazing at the Christmas tree and sparkly packages in the dark, with a steaming cup of spiced cider in hand.

* A wonderful Yule celebration with the Arizona Reclaiming group. This year, I brought my Colorado friend, Lisa, with me. It was her first Wiccan gathering and she got to meet everyone while smudging. Thanks, Lisa! 

*A Yule concert, workshop and joyous shared meals with pagan songstress Wendy Rule and her quirky and dry-witted husband Tim.

* A wonderful Yule celebration with the Arizona Reclaiming group.

This year, I brought my Colorado friend, Lisa, with me. It was her first Wiccan gathering and she got to meet everyone while smudging. Thanks, Lisa!
 

​A night at the Desert Botanical Gardens’ Los Noches de Luminarias, strolling the lit paths and listening to the live performances. 

We try to go here every year. The quiet, candle-lit atmosphere relaxes and grounds, and it’s a wonderful part of the season.

It occurs to me that celebrations are nurturing acts (whether it is nurturing ourselves or others) are the glue that helps hold society together.
 
From the first wild turkey barbequed on a spit in front of a cave, to Thanksgiving dinner pulled out of a fancy, expensive oven, the celebration of eating together is a ritual of sharing.
 
And whether listening to a full orchestra, pagan songs by a bonfire, carolers under the stars, or Grandma romping up a little two-step after dinner, our voices raised in heavenly chorus is praise of the season, our current fortune, our last successful harvest, and our Goddess.
 
This is what celebrations are made of. This is what I wanted to find again.
 
A great loneliness has settled across a great many people in this world. We no longer buy into the old fear-induced religions. The wrathful “gods” have lost their power over us, and we let them rant and rave until we click off our TV sets. But deep inside us there is a space that is painfully empty, as if we had a hollow above our hearts where the old revels used to live, yearning to be filled.

We must be careful about what we feed our spiritual hunger. It can’t be junk food, or hate, or unfocused anger and jealousy.
 
Instead, let’s first fill the emptiness with boundless courage. The courage to renew our faith in ourselves as children of the natural gods. To acquire courage, we must regain our natural dignity, and vow that only the best of thoughts shall enter the sacred space of our mind. We must affirm our kinship with the vast universe, not just the space around us, and claim the Earth, our beautiful blue planet, as our mother. Then we will have found our natural family once more.
 
Today we drink to excess or take drugs, but can you imagine using dance, music, fresh air, moonlight, singing and good company to achieve ecstatic happiness? Imagine becoming gods and goddesses behind our masks, encountering people we would not normally meet and sharing with them the joy of the seasons? Imagine taking back the streets, not only for righteous marches, but for revels, for dancing, and for walking together. Imagine the common denominator is the love of nature and the seasons. Imagine that it abolishes class distinctions, and opens the portals of the rich open to revive the poor with welcome. How does that feel?
 
Celebrate!!  The smallest events can be made into great moments in our lives by taking the time to celebrate them. Let the fun begin!!

Blessed Be to you and yours. May you cross into the New Year laughing!
 

​Happy Winter Solstice!

 Last weekend I had the pleasure of hosting pagan songstress Wendy Rule and her equally talented husband Tim, in town from their new home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

They performed a house concert on Saturday night (thank you so much, Thalia, for hosting this year!). Sunday Wendy held a workshop on the Persephone myth and performed songs from her upcoming double album.
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I hope you are also blessed with a Yule season filled with music, laughter and good conversation with friends. 

Today I sit in the stillness and contemplate.

This is the longest night of the year, the time when the Goddess gives birth to the new spark of hope. Hope for the return of the light to the world, conceived during the rites of Ostara.

The season is for celebrating the rebirth of the sun. The Sun God, who dies at Samhain, is reborn from the Maiden aspect of the Pagan holy trinity: Maiden, Mother and Crone.

On this longest night, the Goddess gives birth to the sun child, when hope for new light is born.

Tonight I am attending a Yule celebration with friends at the Irish Cultural Center. This will be my first time for this event, and we are all excited to participate in the meditation and ritual.

I hope you, too, will have an opportunity this week to contemplate the stillness of the longest days.

To round out my Yule time celebrations, an old and dear friend is coming to stay at our home for a week.

She's not Wiccan or pagan, but she has agreed to accompany me to my Reclaiming group’s gathering on Saturday. She doesn’t know it yet (hi Lisa!), but we volunteered to smudge the group.

That’s an easy introduction to ritual, right?

Our Reclaiming theme this year is, "Find Your Light in the Dark of Night," based on the beautiful poem above by one of our members.

Happy winter solstice all. May the flame of compassion fill your hearts.
May the fire of hope burn bright in your soul.

Every so often, I conduct a special practice to clear out my psyche, atone for the past, and make a new beginning.

This doesn’t mean feeling guilty; just the opposite. It’s more about making room for new things to happen. Nature, who cannot stand empty space, fills the void you make with something new.

So this Yule, as I send out my Winter Solstice greeting cards, I’m including some people with whom I am not on good terms. Those cards say, “Hey, let’s forget our bad times. Blessings to you.”

I’m not sending these cards to ask for forgiveness, I’m sending them to release the negative feelings I’ve been carrying around, to make space in my heart for good, not negativity.

Do you still think about someone who has snubbed you, hurt your feelings or otherwise done you wrong? Try this method, release your negativity, and, if you do, let me know how it feels.
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To make sure the message won’t be understood and make things worse instead of better, rub lavender buds on the card and include some in the envelope. 

Hoping your holiday preparations are bringing you joy…and your New Year is peaceful.
 

​I’m in kind of a funk this holiday season. Not depressed, more like cynical. Maybe it’s POTUS and his deranged antics, but nothing seems pure and sacred this holiday season.
Rather than fight it, I’ve decided to go with the feeling, so here is a collection of weird Yuletide traditions. There’s a lot more than this, of course, but these are the top ones that caught my eye.

#1 - Iceland Hag Gryla

My husband was stationed in Iceland, so it’s been a site of interest in our family for decades. But if you travel to Iceland in December, don’t expect the jolly red-clad figure of Santa Claus.

Instead, you may encounter a menacing, witch-like figure named Gryla.  She is a giant troll hag with hooves for feet and thirteen tails.

She is said to live in a cave hidden deep in the mountains, where she always keeps her cauldron boiling due to her insatiable hunger…for children. Each Christmas, she comes down from her mountain dwelling to hunt for bad children. She throws them in her sack and drags them back to her cave where she boils them alive for her favorite stew.

Gryla’s wrath is not reserved solely for bad children. She has been through three husbands already, two of which she killed because they bored her.
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And, because those who shouldn’t reproduce always do, Gryla has thirteen children, all boys, who are described below.

#2 – The 13 Yule Lads
​Icelandic children place a shoe in their bedroom window each evening in the 13 days before Christmas.

Every night one Yuletide lad visits, leaving sweets and small gifts or rotting potatoes, depending on how that particular child behaved the previous day.

​Each Yule Lad has an idiosyncrasy of behavior, much like the Disney version of Snow White’s seven dwarfs. This is Spoon-Licker, who comes to visit on December 15.

Unlike their mother, they’re not really dangerous, just mischievous pranksters and petty criminals.

Gryla’s pet cat, on the other hand, is a truly nasty creature.
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#3 – The Christmas Cat

Old Icelandic folklore states that every Icelander must receive a new piece of clothing for Christmas, or they will find themselves in mortal danger. An enormous black cat prowls Iceland on Christmas Eve and eats anyone who doesn’t follow this simple rule.
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The threat of being eaten by the Yule Cat was used by farmers as an incentive for their workers to finish processing the autumn wool before Christmas. The ones who took part in the work would be rewarded with new clothes, but those who did not would get nothing and thus would be preyed upon by the monstrous cat. 

​#4 - Candy Cane Anyone?
Candy canes are a classic tree decoration, but as a stocking stuffers they’re so boring – unless you shake things up. Luckily, Amazon has a whole slew of questionable flavors. 

Here are some holiday deviants to try:

Bacon, for those fanatics out there. You know who you are.

Maybe wasabi, for those who like their holiday spicy.

​Or gravy? Eww.

Coffee? If you mixed it with cinnamon I might try it.

And, of course, pickle. Nom nom. They look festive enough for even the most traditional tree, and boy, would your relative’s kids be surprised.

​#5 - The Pickle Ornament
We actually have one of these ornaments and search the tree for it every Christmas. 

Well, the family searches. Since I decorate the tree, I’m ineligible. But that also means that I get to hide it in the deep inner recesses of the branches and make it reeealy hard to find.

The first child who finds the pickle on Christmas morning gets a special gift and good luck all year.

Supposedly, the legend originated in Germany. The trouble with the legend is that people in Germany were unfamiliar with it. Glass tree ornaments are indeed made in Germany, but this particular glass pickle ornament actually became popular in America when F.W. Woolworth began importing them in the 1880s. 

#6 - The Caganer
Every nativity scene should have one of these figures, at least if you live in Spain, Italy or Southern France. In those areas, the nativity is often a large model of the city of Bethlehem, and encompassing the entire city rather than just the manger.

The pastoral scene may include a farmhouse, with the child in a manger, and outlying scenes like a washerwoman by a river, a woman spinning, shepherds herding their sheep, and the Three Wise Men approaching on camels, a scene with the angel and shepherds, the star pointing the way, etc. 

And tucked away in a corner, far from Mary and Joseph, is the Caganer. 

He needs privacy, because he is defecating.

The name “El Caganer” literally means “the crapper.” Traditionally, the figurine is depicted as a peasant, wearing the traditional Catalan red cap and with his trousers down, showing a bare backside, and a pile of, well, crap, on the ground below his butt.

Why? It seems the figurine is a symbol of fertility and good fortune for the land.

Of course, you can now buy Caganers in the image of Shakespeare, Michael Jackson, the POTUS, even the Pope. Why didn’t I know this at my last white elephant holiday party?

I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip down bizarre Christmas lane.  Maybe you’ve even picked up a few last-minute Christmas gift ideas!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO YOU AND YOURS.
 

​National Novel Writing Month 2017 is over. I ended with 35,000 words for the month, and just under 50k written on Crescent Moon Crossing.  I am working my way consistently toward the last, and final, crisis in the story. All that it’s the nitty gritty of the detective work, putting all the pieces together to reveal the killer. 

Meet Abby Merrick
With that in mind, I’d like to introduce you this week to Abigail (Abby) Merrick, the victim in the book. She was born and raised in Southern California, and she looks and sometimes acts the part of a SoCal girl.
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When her husband Jace is transferred to Fort Huachuca Army base for his Intelligence training, she insists on moving also. Jace is confined to the Fort for 17 weeks, so Abby moves in with Rumor Vargas, her roommate from college, who has a working ranch in nearby Bisbee. 

Abby has pressing reasons to stay close to Jace: he’s having a long-time affair with an Army officer who conveniently was also just transferred to Fort Huachuca.

Abby’s wealthy parents were both killed two years ago, and she received a large inheritance, so she is financially independent.

At Rumor’s urging, Abby begins to work as a volunteer at Hope House, an organization that provides water and provisions at stash sites for illegals crossing the Mexican border into the United States. 

Abby is shot and killed While working at the stash site, which is situated in a remote area known for both human and drug smuggling by Mexico’s notorious Sinaloan Cartel.
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Did she inadvertently surprise some drug mules on their delivery route into Tucson or Phoenix? Did her husband carry out his plan to get rid of her?
Or did someone else want Abby dead?

​Border Crossing in the Arizona desert: Gateway to dreams or graveyard?
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants like the ones depicted in my book have tried to cross illegally into the United States over the past several years, even as the government threatens to build a wall and step up investments in manpower and technology to secure the nation's borders.

For those who make it across the border, it isn't an easy journey. Thousands of would-be immigrants have died in the desert of southern Arizona in the past 10 years, according to the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office. Most of them die after suffering dehydration in the summer or fall to hypothermia in the winter.

"People are still driven by economic necessity to come to the United States by whatever means they can. Some come to join family members already here, others because they are hungry," said Isabel Garcia, a public defender and a co-chair of the Tucson, Arizona-based Coalition for Human Rights.
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"But the fact is that very few are prepared for such a hard trip. Many have to survive days and days in the desert," she said, "and they can never carry enough water."

The trek can often last days, as smugglers take them through remote paths in order to avoid detection by the Border Patrol. Wild animals roam the area at night and the people the migrants paid to get them safely across often turn on them, robbing them of their money and abusing the women before abandoning them, according to authorities.
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Just like Naco, the border town I feature in Crescent Moon Crossing, most Mexican border towns, have a Grupo Beta office; it’s the Mexican federal agency that helps those newly deported from the United States and other migrants find food, shelter or a way home. “Don’t put yourself or your family in danger,” blares a poster on one wall. “Putting your children in the hands of coyotes or polleros is like abandoning them in the desert,” warns another.

It’s easy to spot the deportees. They’re the ones without belts or shoelaces. Border Patrol agents remove those from the people they detain to deter suicide attempts, and they don’t generally give them back.

Take Santiago Rivera Diaz, who sits with two other youths, waiting for a ride to a shelter, like Hope House in my story, where he’ll be fed and given a cot for the night. His left arm is in a sling, his left leg heavily bandaged. His wispy beard makes him look younger than his 20 years.

Rivera, who’s from Oaxaca, says he crossed the border two weeks earlier, north of the town of Altar, with two other men and four young women. Their guide collected $500 from each of them. Then he ditched them in the desert. After three days without food or water, they were nearing a major highway (Rivera couldn’t name it, but his description matches I-19), when they were confronted by a group of five armed men — what the Border Patrol calls a “rip” crew — robbers who target drug smugglers and migrants.

“Two of the girls ran away,” says Rivera in a low voice. “We tried to stop them, but they beat us until we played dead. We were hurt, but we made our way to the highway and La Migra came up. They held us three days. Then they brought me here two days ago.”

He says he has no idea what happened to any of the others he was with. Reyes had hoped to find work so he could send money home to his family, who grows corn. But now he’s headed back to Oaxaca.

"Many fall into the abuses of the smugglers, sexual abuse," said Manuel Padilla, head of the Border Patrol's Tucson sector. "The only thing that matters to them is money, not people."

Padilla said Border Patrol agents often spot and rescue immigrants stranded in the desert, which is an important part of the agency's job. However, the agency also focuses on prevention, by educating would-be immigrants of the dangers involved in trying to cross the border illegally.

They ask foreign diplomats at consulates in the United States to spread the word in their countries about the dangers of illegal border crossings, and they try to get the word out in Spanish-language media, Padilla said.

Some make it past the desert and go on to find jobs in the United States. But on the Mexican side of the border, deportations from the United States have become so common that shelters and businesses have opened up, catering to people who've gotten kicked out of the United States.
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Others come back bruised, robbed by smugglers or worse, says Hilda Irene Loureiro, a Mexican merchant who runs a shelter.

There are more than 800 unidentified bodies inside the morgue in Pima County, Arizona. Investigators believe many of them are immigrants who died in the desert. Authorities hope DNA testing can help desperate families find missing loved ones who died on the trek into the United States.

According to the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office, in 2012 the bodies of 157 migrants were recovered in the desert. In 2013, the remains of 169 people were found there.

"Since 2001 we've had around 2,200 immigrant deaths," most of them Mexican citizens, said Gregory Hess, the Pima County medical examiner. "When we find only a bone in the desert, a femur ... or an arm, it's not here for long... we take photographs and measurements and DNA" samples.

Unclaimed bodies and bones are buried or cremated after about a year, he said.

Searching for clues
Since a majority of the bodies belong to Mexican citizens, morgue staff are in regular contact with the Mexican Consulate in Tucson.

It isn't the job Jeronimo Garcia thought he was signing up for when he joined the Mexican Foreign Service. But now he's become so used to handling human remains that he no longer feels the need to wear a surgical mask to protect himself from the stench of death.

The consulate employee has become a go-to person for American authorities when it comes to finding clues about the immigrants' identities.

Garcia has earned the trust of U.S. officials because of his track record over the past 12 years, helping to identify dozens of bodies.

"(This one) has dental work. Sometimes teeth give us clues as to where they come from," Garcia said as he examined cadavers and bones at the Pima County morgue. "Central Americans, particularly Guatemalans, often have ornamental work done. They put copper stars on their teeth."

Migrants sometimes sew documents into their underclothes, or conceal strips of paper with the telephone number of a contact in the United States or their country of origin, he says. This information can be a solid clue to track down identity.

After the extensive search at the morgue, the bodies are labeled and stored in a freezer. Personal effects and identifications are also stored, as any clue could lead to the identification of a cadaver.

Sometimes, there aren't many clues. If all that Garcia and the medical examiner's office have to go on is a set of dry bones, DNA testing is the only viable option.

The Mexican Consulate sometimes pays for the tests when Mexican citizens are involved.
For immigrants from other countries, the medical examiner's office relies on its growing ties with the New York-based Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team.

The organization, which started out trying to identify remains of dissidents killed during Argentina's brutal military dictatorship, now has also collected more than 1,700 DNA samples from families in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Guatemala in efforts to help find missing migrants. So far, they've identified 65 bodies.

"This is never a happy ending. ... We just try to reduce the time that families have to prolong their pain," said Mercedes Doretti, who directs the organization. "What it means is ending the uncertainty of the family not knowing what happened to their relative, the suffering that everyone goes through."

At the Checkpoints: A Million Pounds of Pot
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At the Yuma port of entry, a line of traffic going north, most with Sonora plates, backs up at the Sentri lane for “trusted travelers” who’ve passed a security check. Customs officers are searching an SUV. They soon find tightly wrapped bundles of heroin in the wheel wells, and take the young, well-dressed woman into custody.

Even as the number of migrants detained annually in Arizona has dropped by 70 percent over the past five years, drug seizures have climbed.
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Legal ports of entry are where most heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine seizures are made, Border Patrol officers say. In one week in mid-March, officers made five seizures at Arizona ports of entry totaling 148 pounds of cocaine, 90 pounds of meth, and 9 pounds of heroin. 
But, by volume, marijuana dwarfs everything else. One day last spring, Nogales border officers seized a 1-ton shipment of pot in a tractor-trailer of bell peppers; the next day, they arrested another tractor-trailer driver with 6,219 pounds of marijuana in boxes labeled as vacuum pumps and lamp holders.

The Tucson sector is the main marijuana corridor from Mexico, accounting for 44 percent of all Border Patrol marijuana seizures across the entire Southwest border last fiscal year. Border Patrol agents in the Tucson sector seized more than 1 million pounds of pot. 

Most commonly, that marijuana is hauled across in remote areas by teams of backpackers, agents say. Tracking them remains a challenge. The drones (10 of which have cost $240 million to buy and operate to date) are useful, agents say, but they are sensitive to high winds and the Border Patrol hasn’t yet trained enough controllers to fly them. Last fiscal year, each drone averaged just over an hour and a half in the air a day.

Nor has border security dented traffic in guns headed south. Over the past five years, CBP (Customs Border Patrol) officers have seized, on average, fewer than 2,000 weapons a year presumably headed to the criminal groups sending the drugs north. That represents less than 1 percent of the estimated 252,000 weapons that are bought in the United States and smuggled south each year, according to a recent economic study by the University of San Diego’s Transborder Institute and the Igarapé Institute, based in Brazil.
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“This is an issue that has been studiously ignored by the media,” said Topher MacDougal, one of the authors of the study. He calls for strong background checks, banning cash purchases of guns along the border and tougher criminal penalties for “straw” buyers — people with clean records who buy guns on behalf of those who wouldn’t pass background checks.

I hope you have enjoyed my blogs on the characters and topics in Crescent Moon Crossing during NaNovember. Please consider signing up as a Beta Reader.
As always, thank you for your support!

​See you next week with the first of my blogs on Yule.