fairy garden

We’ve been without a dog for almost three years now and one thing I do miss are the daily walks. My son’s black Lab was here for the holidays and in between playing with Little grandson, cooking copious amounts of food, hanging out with the kids, hosting a baby shower, and whatever else came along with eight extra people in the house, I took the dog on a few walks. Those were calming moments filled with fresh air, quiet, walking at a very sniffy dog’s pace, and new discoveries for him and me.

And we came upon a Christmas fairy garden. 

During the COVID lockdown, fairy gardens became a popular project around neighborhoods. They were all over the place when we walked around ours. They connected people with their sometimes lost imaginations or tapped into more creativity to open up a whimsical world away from the fear and unknown that the coronavirus brought. 

Fairy gardens have a cultural tie to Germanic and/or Celtic (Irish) folklore. The underlying mythical belief is that there are fairies that live in our gardens, and these fairies can either be mischievous or can bring good luck, depending on how well they are respected and treated. If you want to appeal to the fairies in your garden and get into their good graces, you need to create an enticing world filled with flowers, comfortable places to live and shelter, and sparkly things. Do this, and your fairies will take up residence and your garden will thrive. There is also a tradition of placing fairy doors and small houses in the woods near trees. This is a tactic that attracts good fairies to the area, but mainly creates a sense of magic and wonder for the lucky person - in this case, me! - who happened to be passing by.