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b"Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com\\nSuntree Retreat 2024: https://theapsocietyorg.wordpress.com/news-and-events/suntree-retreat-2024/\\nSeason 5 -\\xa0Episode 3\\n----more----\\n\\xa0\\nYucca: Welcome back to The Wonder Science Based Paganism. I'm your host Yucca,\\nMark: And I'm Mark.\\nYucca: and we are back in another year. To talk about that February holiday and the Wheel of the Year,\\nMark: Yeah because this is the first holiday after a spate of activity that is reflected in mainstream holidays like Halloween and Christmas and Hanukkah and those sorts of things. And this one, you know, this one we fly solo as pagans, right?\\nYucca: right? I mean, there is an associated Catholic celebration at the time, but, you know, that's that's not the whole mainstream culture,\\nMark: right, it hasn't been secularized the way so many other, you know, holidays have been, that have been turned into sort of generic practices that nearly everybody does. Yeah and here in the Northern Hemisphere, there is noticeably more light now. I was noticing yesterday there was still light in the sky at quarter of six.\\nYucca: Oh.\\nMark: that was pretty cool, because, you know, at the solstice, the sun goes down at about 425,\\nYucca: hmm.\\nMark: so there was, that's, that's a big change, and it's, it's still wet and cold here because this tends to be the coldest time of the year, really,\\nYucca: Mm hmm.\\nMark: But, you At least the days aren't so incredibly short and those long, long, long, long nights that we get in the deep of winter.\\nYucca: Yeah, well, it's so different in different places, what's going on, right? We've talked about this before, but you know, for some people, for me, this is the most bitter time of the year. January, the beginning of February it's actually quite funny, last night, my kids really wanted to do a campfire. And We've been talking about it all week and we had finally rusted out our campfire bowl.\\nSo we have a, because we have to be very, even in the winter like this, we have to be really careful about fire safety. So what we have is we have this Like a, a ring of stones with gravel, and then we have one of those fire bowls that's lifted up that you can put a lid on. But we had finally rusted out the bottom of the one that we had had for years, so we had to get a new one and wait for it to come.\\nAnd, you know, they wanted to do the, the, the first fire and the new bowl and all of that. And it was a full work day for me, so I get out of work and we go outside. And it starts snowing.\\nMark: Ha ha ha\\nYucca: And so we're out there trying to get this fire to start in the snow, and the way we ended up finally doing it was putting a hat of foil on top of the fire to get it to go.\\nSo because once the fire started, as the snow would come close to it, it would heat up and melt and evaporate and would be fine. But when you're trying to start a wet fire, it was, it was quite, quite a an event to do so. But I was thinking about how, for us, this is the, we will quickly move into spring in a few months, but this is the coldest, most bitter, you know, we had over the past few weeks, we had single digits in Fahrenheit.\\nSo, you know, we're, and for those who do Celsius, we're talking about, you know, negative 15 degrees Celsius, and those sorts of temperatures, the ground is frozen. But for other people, This is a holiday in which they're celebrating, oh look, the little flowers are starting to peek through the snow, and spring is here, and everything is brightening up, and I'm like, it's cold.\\nThat's what it is here. It's cold. So, and of course, folks who are in, you know, Florida, it's a completely different experience for them, or Southern California, or Anywhere even closer to the equator is just radically different.\\nMark: One of our community members was talking about how right around now is when it's most tolerable in Florida because it gets so hot and muggy in the summertime and so this, whic"