Blessed Be, and Happy New Year!

It’s a new year, ripe with new possibilities as we gestate in the womb of the Goddess. We have accomplished much this past year, and now is the time to take stock of what we have done before we make plans for the future.

First, the Early Bird Discount for Spring Mysteries ends January 31st. Get your registration in quickly: https://aquatabch.infellowship.com/UserLogin/Index?ReturnUrl=%2fForms%2f270296 Beds are filling up faster than I’ve ever seen, I’m happy to say. If you want a bed, you might need to go ahead and get one. The prices are as low as we can give you right now. Of course, it’s a fundraiser, so if you can help us out with more, please do. We are excited about having a local Greek Restaurant, for the Main Kitchen, catering all our meals. Delicious, amazing food will be prepared with love by a professional staff, all on-site!

The Calendar sales have been great, we are almost out of calendars. If you want one, be sure to get your donation in to paypal.me/ATCWicca. Every donation above $10 receives a calendar as a thank-you. Be on the lookout for our next gift, a 2016 ATC Festival t-shirt for you to wear to pagan events, so that your ATC, SpiralScouts and Seminary brothers and sisters can find you. More on those coming soon.

We’re undergoing an overhaul on all our websites. They are being professionally done by Lopo Designs. ATCWicca.Org, our international site, and WiccanSeminary.EDU, the seminary site, have already been redesigned. SpringMysteries.com and Sickle.Me have been added to the list of fun. The bulky and confusing domain AquaTabCh.Org will be forwarded to a new site called MotherChurch.Org. There are all kinds of new website upgrades coming our way in 2016.

Cassie, Dusty and I will be traveling with several other ATC Elders to PantheaCon this February, Valentine’s Day weekend. The ATC has a hospitality suite and will be teaching a workshop on Sunday Morning at 9am. We will be hosting Shrine Visits with Aphrodite, Persephone, Apollo, and the White Goddess over the weekend. We will also have a wine and tarot night, which should be a blast! Come on out and see us if you go to PantheaCon, or are anywhere near San Jose, California next month.

SpiralScouts is launching their new Galactic Chocolate Sale Fundraiser! Galaxy Chocolates of Sultan, WA, is working with the ATC and SpiralScouts to help us raise funds for the children’s events this year. Watch for news on that, and join us in supporting the kids by buying delicious, hand dipped, gourmet chocolates and caramels made by a local business.

This Yule we were blessed with Pasado gifting our animal familiars and making sure they were not forgotten this Holiday season. Honeybear was happy to see the huge influx of pet products, but Iroh, the Kitty-man, was so excited he told me Daddy was a hero for scoring all that stuff! The animals were all happy to get their yearly supply, and their owners were as well.

Home Depot and their generous grant helped us save the Hecate Shrine this summer. Our priests came in from the backyard one night with an urgency that the Shrine supports had to be fixed immediately. We called up Home Depot and they helped us find everything we needed to ensure the safety of the shrine. Within a couple of weeks, we had a work-party arranged and were reinforcing the beams that hold up the shrine. As the men were putting in the final nails, a 4.+ earthquake hit Gold Bar, shaking the main house, and scaring everyone in it. No one at the Hecate Shrine knew what happened though. They had fixed it just in time. Thank Goddess for her guidance, and the rest of us for listening and responding!

Home Depot has given us $5,000 worth of building materials each month. We have been able to help the needy in our congregation with repairs on their homes, as well as reach out to the local community in Index, to beautify the neighborhood, and work to be a good neighbor to the community we live in. If you have a need for building supplies, let us know how we can help. We currently have some kitchen sinks, mailboxes, some cabinets and bathroom vanity sets, and irregular doors that are available to anyone in need.

Most of the supplies are going to build dorm rooms and apartments for visitors and residents. The Greenman Guild has worked tirelessly in the past few months to repair and care for the property. Unfortunately one day a month is not enough to build a building, and we are looking at increasing our meetings to once a week on Wednesdays, so those that can’t come on weekends can participate in Mother Church activities, and we can get more stuff done. If you want to come up and help with the Greenman Guild, you can join their facebook page to be up to date on events.

For all of our blessings, the Flood in November really took a toll on us. I made the mistake of mentioning to Goddess that the Flex had 170,000 miles on it and it was only a 2012. It’s an expensive car and we have driven it everywhere. I was wondering how I was going to get out from under that car payment. I was thinking trade in, but She decided to total it out in the flood instead. Yay no car payment! Boo no car. The church’s cars are old and paid off, but not reliable for distance travel. We are going to PantheaCon in a month, so if you have a vehicle with good storage space that the three of us can take there and back, I can trade you the Jeep for the weekend. That will save the church from having to purchase a new vehicle for at least a few more months. Buying a new car, or having one donated, is in our future. Let me know if you have ideas of how we can do this cost effectively. I want Ford to give us a new Flex, but I’ll take what the Goddess provides.

For years Pete had a schedule at the Tab of meeting on the first and third Saturday of the month. This was crazy to me. I didn’t like it. Why would we do such a thing and not meet on the sabbats & moons like other witches? He explained that the sabbats usually fell on one of those days, and whatever was happening on the other weekend gave the public a chance to experience whatever astrological phenomenon was coming up, ie. full moon, new moon, sabbat, what have you. This made no sense to me and the new group of witches that gathered here to keep the Mother Church alive during Pete’s passing, so we decided to change the calendar to meet on Sabbats & Moons.

After doing this for several years, and trying to nurture our own coven members with private events and training as well, we have discovered the wisdom behind Pete’s magic. Thanks for giving us the right to discover our own path Pete! Over the next year we will be moving our event dates to reflect this type of calendar again. Obviously our sabbat dates have been set in stone, as the calendar has been printed and mailed to many. However, the rest of the dates this year will reflect the change over to the previous schedule. In 2017 we will move completely to the first and third Saturday of the month to make it easier to remember when we’re doing things up here, and to give you both variety and stability.

Pete has been very active at the house. No one is allowed to sit in his seat at the Hot Tub without him turning off the lights, and jets, or otherwise making his presence known. He’s been fixing things that break, bringing us things we couldn’t find, and directing us in many ways, even from the other side. He and I talked about this often. I told him we’d let him hang around and guide us as long as he wanted to, and it seems he is keeping true to his word. We love it when he shows up, even if it does freak us out to see him walking around the house.

Finally, we are planning on staying closer to home this spring and summer. The current tour schedule this year will take us to Three Gates, St. Louis Pagan Picnic and possibly PSG, but it’s still in the works. If you know of a great festival this side of the rockies that we should attend this year, send Dusty or me the info. We look forward to spending the summer with our West Coast family this year, but will miss our loved ones on the East Coast - plan on seeing us in 2017!