How to create a wish tree

(Craft project for all Sabbats)

Materials:

Directions:

Create the basic shape of a tree with five branches with the floral wire, then wrap it with brown floral tape until it resembles a tree. Allow the tree to have roots that will stick into the floral foam, leaving enough room for them to encircle a nut of your choice. Over the course of the wheel of the year, you'll use the tree to represent five wishes you make. Here are the seasonal suggestions for how to use the tree:

Yule: Take your nut and anoint it with catalystic oil, encouraging it to grow. The bare tree symbolizes the year's newness, beginning of possibility, a blank slate to write upon.
Imbolc: Make your wishes. Figure out a good combination of herbs to represent five different wishes. It is suggested that you take very small quantities of each herb (a pinch) and put them in a very small mixing receptacle, such as the bowl of a candlestick, where they can be stirred (with a toothpick, a chopstick, or the point of a knife) and perhaps enhanced with appropriate oils. Take each mixture and put it in a little sheet of gauze material, make a tiny bundle out of it, and hang it with thread or yarn on one branch of the tree. Label each bundle so that you know which bundle represents which wish. (You can label them with initials or codes and have the more elaborate version of each wish hidden somewhere else, so that wherever your tree is in your house, people cannot snoop into the business of your wishes if they'd be so inclined). Anoint each branch with catalystic oil to encourage growth.
Ostara: Add little green leaves to each tree branch as a symbol of the wishes beginning to manifest. As you fasten leaves to each branch (with the help of floral wire or tape), think about that particular wish and what you're doing to help it come true. Anoint each branch with catalystic oil to encourage further growth.
Beltane: Add small buds to each leafy branch, to symbolize the beginning of the fruits of your labor, a symbol of being on the brink of success. Anoint each bud with catalystic oil to encourage further growth.
Litha: Replace the small buds with fully flowered miniatures, as a symbol of fortune being in full flower. This is when the wishes should have manifested by, when your hard work has paid off. Anoint each flower with a blessing oil, for thanks.
Lughnasadh: Replace the flowers with dried flower buds, which look as though they are withered flowers. Touch each with blessing oil, acknowledging the "harvest" of your wishes.
Mabon: Take the withered flowers off and place them around the base of the tree as though they have fallen off. Touch each branch with blessing oil.
Samhain: Take the leaves off the branches and place them around the base of the tree as though they have fallen off. Remove all the bundles and tags and burn them, creating ashes. Save the ashes until next season.

Your second year of using the tree, you can replace the nut with a new nut on Yule, and plant the old nut outside. Also place the ashes from the Samhain burning of the herbs and scatter them in the tree's pot, underneath the foam, as a symbolic fertilization of next year's tree. The year after that, you can bury both the previous year's nut and its ashes together, once you have a new set of ashes.

Pagan craft projects

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