🏃‍♀️ Weekly Witchy CHALLENGE - Catch-Up!

Activities
30

:warning: Content/trigger warning: This post contains content about death. If this will make you uncomfortable, please feel free to skip over this post. I will blur any portions that discuss this topic. :warning:

I apologize for the length of this post. Feel free to skip to the bottom for a TLDR summary :sweat_smile:

Challenges chosen:

For my Weekly Witchy Challenge this week, I was glad that it was a Catch-Up Week because I’m just now starting to get more involved in this community. I chose two topics I’m most interested in at the moment: kitchen witchery and communicating with, and honoring, those on The Other Side.

My main goal for choosing these two topics was to combine them to help me continue through my process of mourning the loss of my paternal grandma who was murdered by her doctor several years ago.

I must admit, this challenge was a bit more difficult for me than I anticipated it to be. I ended up having to modify my plans slightly to be able to make it work for my current circumstances, so I’ll have to circle back when the weather gets nicer and my circumstances change a bit.

I wanted to bake a batch of my late paternal grandma’s “Sno Balls,” but my dad recently had to make a dramatic change to his diet, and I didn’t bake the Sno Balls as planned; I wanted to be supportive of his recent dietary restrictions. Instead, I printed out a copy of her recipe and used it as a focal point for several meditation sessions.

Unfortunately, since I didn’t bake the Sno Balls, and am not comfortable sharing my grandma’s recipe, this post won’t have any photos to break up the massive wall of text. :confused:

During these meditation sessions, I meditated on her loving intention behind writing down the recipe, the memories I have of eating the Sno Balls made by her, and the time I got to spend with her before she passed. I was trying to open myself up to a visit from her. In a way, I felt her love enveloping me.

I didn’t get the one-on-one communication-type-of-visit I was really hoping for, but I did feel as if she was channeling her love for her family through the recipe, almost as if it were a type of sigil. I don’t feel comfortable sharing her recipe because that kind of stuff is very special, if not sacred, to me, but here is a recipe that is very similar to her Sno Balls.

When I was researching the correspondences of the main ingredients in my grandma’s Sno Balls, my connection with the recipe deepened profoundly.

Without going into too much personal family history detail, my paternal grandma grew up extremely poor. And when I say poor, I mean she had around $150 per month (if I remember correctly) to survive on poor. So poor that when she was a kid, she couldn’t afford to buy a single piece of chewing gum, so during the summer, she would pick tar off the road and chew it.

That being said, when she got older and gained financial stability, pecans were one of her favorite foods. She would cram as many pecans as she possibly could into her Sno Balls while allowing them to still hold together once baked.

According to Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Wicca in the Kitchen ( CEWK ) by Scott Cunningham, pecans are associated with money and employment. I find it fascinating that my grandma who grew up in extreme poverty was so drawn to a nut that is associated with that which she didn’t have until her early adulthood.

Today, most Americans would classify these Sno Balls as cookies. However, they are not flattened like the cookies mentioned in CEWK (p. 68), and they are very similar to the Crescent Cakes on page 161 of Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner by Scott Cunningham. Crescent Cakes and similar baked goods are often used in the “Cakes and Ale” portion of ritual work. Therefore, I’m classifying my grandma’s Sno Balls as cakes for the purposes of this post.

In CEWK , Cunningham states that “All cakes … are ruled by Venus and the element of water, and so are imbued with loving energies” (p. 62). These Sno Balls were staples of any of my family get togethers, regardless of the season. They were always lovingly offered to us by my grandma.

In addition to the general association of cakes with love, sugar itself is also associated with love ( CEWK , p. 158). These cakes were lovingly rolled in powdered sugar, as if the powdered sugar was an extra layer of love. In addition, the sugar and butter used to make these little balls of love were heavily rationed during the World War II era, greatly increasing the strength of the intention of love when these were prepared “back in the day.”

I could continue rambling about this topic forever, but I should stop here. :sweat_smile:

TLDR: I broke down my grandma’s recipe into its component parts and meditated on the meaning of the ingredients as they relate to the recipe and my family history. I attempted to open myself up to the stereotypical communication contact with my late grandma while meditating on one of her recipes. I didn’t get that stereotypical contact, but I did get a sense of her love, as well as a deeper appreciation of the many meanings and emotions behind her recipe. I began researching the magickal properties of common ingredients; in this case, sugar, butter, and pecans. Through my interest in kitchen witchery, I deepened my bond with my late grandma.

I also set out to learn more about when The Veil Between Worlds thinned, but most of the information I could find other than a discussion on here about the Veil also thinning around Ostara focused solely on the thinning around Samhain.

Other Sources:

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