Licks butter off of door posts
I usually do some sort of drawing for the winter solstice on the solstice itself and what’s above is this year’s. This is my first piece of color in a couple of months; I literally dusted off the Cintiq to do it.
Instead of the typical Celtic/Wiccan/Robert Graves solstice theme, I thought I might see what other imagery I could play with and found this courtesy of Wikipedia:
The Saami, indigenous people of Finland, Sweden and Norway, worship Beiwe, the sun-goddess of fertility and sanity. She travels through the sky in a structure made of reindeer bones with her daughter, Beiwe-Neia, to herald back the greenery on which the reindeer feed. On the winter solstice, her worshipers sacrifice white female animals, and with the meat, thread and sticks, bed into rings with ribbons [sic]. They also cover their doorposts with butter so Beiwe can eat it and begin her journey once again.
Though I didn’t get it done for the solstice proper, I still thought it appropriate to share given the current snow bound state of Portland, Oregon. There is a truly impressive amount of snow on the ground for Portland, mostly unspoiled by plowing or shoveling. Something which I got to experience first hand during a foraging trek to the grocery store earlier today, where I happened to have bought butter among other things. Though we’ll be using it to put on pancakes, I think.
