The eight sacred Celtic holidays of the year - from St. Brigid's Day to the winter solstice - PHOTOS

St.Brigid is the patroness of our order of the LAOH, Division #18, Daughters of Erin, Girardville, Pennsylvania, and we always honor her with a mass as close to her feast day on February 1st as we can arrange it. There are those of us who also continue to honor the Goddess Brigid, for long before Christianity, she was in Ireland. When I had my first daughter, she was named for Brigid the Saint as well as the Goddess - her birthday is near the end of January. Brigid - saint or goddess or both - remains an extremely powerful influence over many of our lives. Her abbey in Kildare is one of the most sacred places in the world and a most visit for anyone who continues to feel a strong connection to their Celtic spirituality. Walking the earth where she once stood is a once in a life time experience. She is beyond the boundaries of religion and was considered by many to be more powerful and more holy than St. Patrick for she was a true daughter of Ireland. Patrick, on the other hand, was for all intense purposes, an immigrant. We women would do well to remember that women in ancient Ireland had a great deal of power and equality even before the Brehon Laws. Women are the givers of life and Celtic mythology, legend, and found artifacts clearly support the age old power of the "fairer" sex.

St. Brigit, the saint whose feast day we celebrate on the 1st ofFeb. has many churches named in her honor in this country, including the one in Lexington, Mass, about three hundred yards from the Minutemen Memorial, and the one in Tomkin's Square Park (NYC's lower Eastside), which Cardinal Egan tried very hard to demolish about seven years ago.