Coming so early in the season, when it’s too cold to plant in many places, and in most, too cold to cavort in the woods, Imbolc is a time when we can focus on courtship. One way we represent the courtship of the maiden-again Goddess and the precociously growing God is by putting representations of the Them in a specially-made “bed,” which is then left before the fire or in some other significant place.

Now, in the old days, you left the biddy and the wand in the bed—in the ashes of the hearth fire!—and if, in the morning, you found the ashes disturbed, you could take it as a good sign for the coming year. But not everyone has a fireplace with ashes the Sacred Couple can leave in disarray, and not all of us leave ashes when we build fires at South. When we left the biddy and the wand alone overnight, we hoped to see them undisturbed the next day—if the small creatures that prowl our yards in the night (ranging from stray cats to ground squirrels, rabbits, and rats) respect their privacy, then, we believe, the Year’s crops and harvest will be good.

Thus, we all bring the old customs forward in new ways, and with new meanings. Through the generations, our lives change, and so do the ways we celebrate. It honors the Goddess and God when we remember what the Sabbats meant to our ancestors, or what the old customs meant to the first generation of Wiccans; it honors the God and Goddess and our ancestors when we adapt the old customs to our modern lives and understandings of the worlds. We can’t always use what we inherit the same way those who left it did. We still honor them, though, when we cherish what we inherit enough to find new ways of making it relevant in our lives.