Kage Baker always celebrated Lammas with pizza. She said it was the closest thing she could get to a flaming wheel, which was an image she connected with the holiday – the Sun In Splendour, bonfires, bale fire on hilltops, a thousand dancers in a ring … with torches. Pizza matched this ritual imagery in her mind, and so it became the ritual food for Lammas.

And since the Celts tended to mark time by nights (not days), most of their holidays ran over two solar cycles. That gives you an extra day to party, in Kage’s judgement; and really, one can never have too much pizza. It also gives one an automatic pass if one does not manage to celebrate on August 1st, which I did not manage to do. So, Happy Lammas now, Dear Readers. Have a pizza tonight.

Setting it literally on fire is not necessary. It’s not even very possible. Unless you are very fond of anchovies and use very oily ones … that sort of works. I speak from  personal experience, by the way, and am happy to pass on my dubious findings to the rest of         you …

One of the points of this is that celebrations are infinitely mutable – you can do anything with them. You can make them out of anything. You can accessorize them any way you like. The only goal is to establish the sacred in life – and while pizza may not seem like a sacred food to most people, it can be. Its role as the sun, as the burning wheel that was holy to Kage and I, as a basic bread-stuff, as a food usually consumed in company – all lend themselves to its inclusion in a sacred space. Kage said it depended on how you viewed God, and what He liked to eat. Pretty basic, really.

And if beer (as per Benjamin Franklin) is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy, then how can pizza be any less? That was Kage’s reasoning, anyway. She said she had no idea what skittles were, but rather thought they might be shoe string potatoes – which she hated. So pizza was better.

Regardless of what (and if) you eat anything to celebrate Lammas, I’m taking this opportunity to try an end run around my eyes. I am currently wearing an eye patch on my left eye – one that fits over my actual glasses, so I can still see out of the right eye which is not misbehaving. The eye patch, though, protects the left eye – and its spreading cataract – from bright light, which had been causing daily migraines. It also eliminates the double visions and colour variations caused by my easily-bamboozled brain trying to coordinate the input from my wildly differing eyes.

Plus, the patches are cool beyond belief. Kimberly – always the crafty one of us – found wonderful patterns on line, invented by some lady who had to make them for her visually handicapped child. They are soft, light cotton cloth; Kimberly chose lovely small designs in dark blues and blacks, and I am attaching stick- on gems to them. Sparklies! After wearing them for a week – and they keep getting better, as Kimberly improves the pattern – I can now type a little, and read for about an hour at a time. Gods and goddesses, what a relief!

Because my typos are many – and no amount of clever eye patches are going to improve my native inability to spell – Kimberly is editing these entries before I post them. She is patient and clever and incredibly gracious to do this. Once again, Dear Readers, I cannot stress enough the vital necessity of choosing your siblings well; you never know when you  will need them for something remarkable.

Tomorrow I hope to expound upon the mutability and impermanence of surfaces. All mine have become weird in the extreme.

And a happy Lammas to you all!