Picture from Zazzle.com, sentiment from home.
There're as many traditions and variations in Paganism as there are in any other religion, but in general, they tend to be based on preindustrial and agricultural concepts of seasonal change. There are myths for Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter, holidays to mark the places where they turn, and associations based on the plants, weather and animals expected during those seasons.
But there's a problem: most of the more prominent traditions, the ones detailed in the books you find in the New Age sections of bookstores and libraries, are based on a temperate seasonal and ecological system. We, however, live in a subtropical (Jax, down to around Orlando) or tropical (south of Orlando, to Miami and the Keys) climate. As I'm sure you've all noticed, especially if you come from somewhere further north before living here, Florida seasons are very different. We have a disproportionate number of warm months and sometimes no real cold at all-- at best, only a few weeks of moderate cold that barely freezes water, and almost never snows. It's why people from the Northern States overwinter here, and why so many people from everywhere retire here. It's why we get strawberries in the winter, and why the Zellwood Corn Festival is well before the ones held in the Breadbasket States.
And it leaves us with three choices: 1 - Live in a tropical-type climate and celebrate temperate-type holidays that have little to so with what's going on in the world before us, 2- Alter the religious system to better reflect the world we actually live in, or 3 - A hybrid of these first two ideas.
There's pros and cons to all three, of course. Option one connects us with the ages-old spiritual traditions of Europe and sometimes all the way back to the Paleolithic, as well as the traditions of the first people who openly declared themselves Pagan and set up the modern movement for all of us who follow these paths today. But it leaves us with what could be called 'cognitive dissonance'-- when the world as it is and the world as we want to see it don't match up. Who wants to think about heavy, filling, autumnal meals and the near-starvation of winter when we're still suffering through highs in the mid eighties and nineties, and oppressive humidity? Option two eases this dissonance, allowing us to align the rituals and the myths we follow and base our spiritual lives around, but it leaves us out of phase with the rest of the Pagan world, and it makes it kind of hard to look up precedents for ritual work and spells on the internet because we'd have to basically make it up as we go. Option three could be seen as wishy-washy, or it could be interpreted as complicated, but on the other hand, it's probably the best solution: acknowledge both the world as it is and the world as it was.
This isn't anything new to a pagan in the modern age, and it certainly isn't new to a pagan in the lands so frequently controlled by the fire-and-brimstone sorts of Christians; we're used to living in a world that's both aligned with us inside our communities and our circles, and frequently against us (or at least uninformed about us) outside in the larger community. So it's just another step along that line: track both the traditional seasons and their holidays, and the Southern seasons with the augmented holidays that they demand. For example: traditionally, the harvest holidays are about the last great bounty before the world shuts down for winter, but here in the South, there's a winter harvest, too. Yule can be expanded to include that last harvest that more northerly states don't get, and the others can be even more fruitful. The summer holidays can be not just a celebration of the strength of the sun's power, but also a supplication that it doesn't get too strong and burn everything down, and an acknowledgment of the strength of storms and the ocean as well.
It takes some thought, but it isn't hard-- you just have to open up the doors in your spiritual life. Once you let in the seasons as they are here, you're on your way to developing a real regional understanding of the spiritual world, something linked to your home as well as your spiritual self, and it helps make everything flow smoother and feel more magical.
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