Hi, my loves and welcome to WiccaNow. Recently I’ve been talking about some of the Wicca Sabbats, like this post about Samhain and another about Imbolc. I’ve also shared my guide to Lammas/Lughnasadh along with my favourite Lammas ritual. Today I want to continue down this path by sharing my favourite Lammas decorations with you.
Lammas is all about celebrating the abundance in your life and of the season. The end of the Summer is when a lot of crops are being harvested and as such, this is a time when there is plenty of delicious fresh fruit and vegetable available. Lammas is a celebration of this.
Formerly, this time of the year was the time when you would take stock of what you have for the rest of the year. You’ve harvested your grain and you know what you can use each day to make it through the winter. It would be a scary time, imagine what it would feel like if you realised the harvest was small and that you would have to struggle through winter…
Celebrating the harvest is a way of asking the greater powers to bring and sustain the abundance in your life. It’s a time to be generous and hopeful. Take time to analyse what you wanted for the year so far whether that has come to fruition. Enjoy the little successes and celebrate the summer.
Table of Contents
My 10 Favourite Lammas Decorations
Below are my 10 favourite Lammas decorations. Decorations aren’t a necessity. Maybe you have an altar and maybe you don’t. As with everything within Wicca and Witchcraft, how you want to practise is completely up to you. Maybe you’re having a Lammas feast and you want to decorate your table or maybe your planning on setting up a Lammas altar in you home somewhere. Whichever you decide, below are some suggestions for common Lammas decorations. You can choose to incorporate just one element or a few or all of them.
Because the days are generally still long and balmy, it can be fun to set up a table outside and have your celebration outdoors. String up some lights and light some candles. Play your favourite music and have a boogie. This Sabbat is all about enjoying the things you love so if there is something that you are particularly enamoured with, feel free to add this to your decorations!
Lammas Decorations #1 Fresh Bread
Lammas means “loaf mass” so what better way to decorate than with some freshly baked bread? If you’ve never made bread before it can seem a little scary. I promise that it’s so, so worth it though! Freshly baked bread, made with love and cut while it’s still warm is like the ultimate comfort food. Slather it with butter and a sprinkle of sea salt and you’ll be in heaven.
There are some researchers who believe that the human brain started to develop more once crops could be cultivated because less energy was needed for pure survival. Crops meant grain, and grain meant bread. The oldest known remains of bread are from around 14,500 years ago and researchers now think that ancient hunter-gatherers were inspired to cultivate crops because making bread from wild grains was just too labour intensive. So potentially bread was the reason humans developed into what we are now. Kind of mind-blowing.
What better way to celebrate longevity, prosperity and abundance than with something so intrinsically linked to human development? I’ve always enjoyed making my own bread but recently I’ve started making sourdough. It’s my favourite type of bread and while it’s a little tricky to make I do think that it’s 100% worth it. I use the Tartine Bakery recipe and while it may seem intimidating to start, the time you need gets less and less the more you make it.
Lammas Decorations #2 Corn
Corn is another wonderful Lammas decoration. Not only is it super pretty to look at, but it’s also ridiculously delicious and is one of the most abundantly grown crops in the world (in the form of maize). There are just so many ways you could use corn for your decorations.
- Fresh sweet corn – set up your table outside and place a bunch of fresh ears of sweetcorn onto it. As the evening progresses you can grab an ear from the table every now and again and throw it on a BBQ. Smother it with chilli flakes and lime (and maybe some butter) so a delicious snack.
- Popcorn – make massive bowls of popcorn and have fun making decorative string out of it. Choose one of the Lammas colours as your thread for the strings and then hang them around your table or wherever you are celebrating. The bonus here is if you get peckish during the evening you have a constant snack supply which is the epitome of abundance if you ask me.
- Make a corn doll – this is a very common decoration to see on a Lammas altar as it’s a direct representation of the harvest. A corn doll is also a common decoration of an Imbolc altar so you can reuse it if you want to later in the year! These are also sometimes called Brigid Dolls after the Goddess.
Lammas Decorations #3 Fresh Flowers
I absolutely love fresh flowers! If I had a garden it would be filled with all sorts of wild flowers and insect and bee friendly plants. My ultimate decoration for Lammas would be to go into my garden and pick a huge bouquet of home grown summer flowers. Generally I don’t cut flowers, because I’d rather leave them for all the little critters that need them but once in a while I like to indulge myself and Lammas is definitely the time of year to do this. Use whatever flowers are growing around you in August or anything that reminds you of the sun.
I love nasturtiums and when I last had a garden I would always pick a few long pieces and lay them down the middle of my table as a main component of my Lammas decorations. You can eat the flowers and leaves so by the end of the evening a lot of the flowers were gone, maybe I was a rabbit in another life. You could also do this with honeysuckle which smells best at night anyway.
I like to choose flowers in Lammas colours if I can but I’m not strict about this. Some common flower choices which correspond to Lammas are:
- Sunflowers
- Calendula
- Marigold
- Nasturtium
- Cornflowers
- Poppies
- Zinnias (also some of my favourites, they always seem so happy to me whichmakes me happy)
- Chrysanthemum
- Lillies
- Dahlias
- Cosmos
Lammas Decorations #4 Dried or Fresh Wheat
A friend of mine has an urban garden, and in a patch that he couldn’t plant in because he wasn’t sure what had been in the soil previously (German cities can be quite polluted, generally it’s not advised to plant directly into the ground if you’re in the city, my friend has all raised beds) he once threw away some old grains for the birds. Lo and behold, every year there is now a bunch of wheat that’s growing there. I like to pick a few handfuls and place them on my Lammas table amidst the flowers.
You can find dried bunches of wheat online pretty easily and it makes a lovely addition to any Lammas decorations you might have planned. You could have a few large vases with just wheat in them and that alone would be an amazing way to honour the sabbat!
If you have access to fresher wheat, you can make a different version of corn dolls. These are woven charms which have roots in Ancient Celtic traditions. They are made with dried (but not too dry) wheat and are really pretty. Below is a video explaining how to make them.
Lammas Decorations #5 Fresh Fruit and Vegetable
This is a fun way to decorate and also to have snacks on hand. I’m all about the snacks, if you haven’t noticed. As I mentioned before, I’ll often lay flowers and wheat down the centre of my table. Adding seasonal fresh produce to this makes for an amazing table decoration. There is nothing that speaks to me of abundance more than a generous table filled with the most delicious food.
Places heaps of vine tomatoes around basil plants. Add a few ears of fresh corn along with bunches of ripe grapes and some figs. Intersperse with some eggplants and zucchini and whatever else looks fresh and delicious on the day. I always go for an explosion of produce which you can eat throughout the evening. Because I usually BBQ for Lammas, I’ll grab things from the table and grill them as the need arises. I feel like this is a great way of decorating while also being practical and not wasting anything.
Lammas Decorations #6 Ribbons in Lammas Colours
A cute, relatively cheap and very re-usable way to decorate it to hang a bunch of ribbons in Lammas colours all over the place. Paper ribbons are easy to come by, make everything super festive and don’t cost that much so I do quite like to use those to decorate.
Another option is to buy a few metres of different coloured satin ribbons and then to wrap those around some empty jars or glasses. Place these on the table and put a tea light into each and you have an easy and really nice decoration to honour the sabbat. This is also a great way to keep any tea lights from causing fires and from being blown out by the wind. So many reasons why this is a great decoration.
Lammas Colours are:
- Green
- Yellow
- Gold
- Red
- Orange
- Light brown
Lammas Decorations #7 Crafting Supplies/Crafting Station
If you love making things and have friends or kids who love getting creative this can be a really fun way to celebrate. Get some colourful paints and brushes, break out your watercoloured pencils or get some crayons out. You could make corn dolls together, paint faces or create anything that brings you joy.
Having the time to create things is a form of abundance and plenty to me because it’s a time where life isn’t just about surviving. When in this busy world do you allow yourself the luxury of sitting down and making something or no purpose other than enjoyment? Not very often I’m guessing, so what better time to do it than Lammas.
You can just set out a whole bunch of random things and hope that everyone feels inspired or you could get more specific and lead the way in a collage or painting a picture. I tend to stay away from adding glitter because it ends up everywhere and the plastic basically never breaks down so that glitter that was fun for a short while will end up in the earth, being accidentally eaten by animals or worse in the ocean where it’ll break down into microplastic and choke everything around it. Not ideal so don’t use it!
Things I add to my crafting station
- Different coloured paper
- Watercolour paints or pencils
- Potatoes – This might seem weird but you can make the cutest potato stamps by carving halved potatoes
- Scissors
- Cardboard
- Old magazines
- Flowers you dried during the summer
- Glue
- Whatever else strikes your fancy that is fun to make things with. Embroidery thread and needles, cloth scraps, get everyone white socks to paint with fabric paint etc
Lammas Decorations #8 Honey and Beeswax Candles
Bees are active all spring and summer and being able to harvest some of their honey at the end of the season is magickal. I used to have a beehive and I loved it so much. The honey took on magickal significance for me because it was just such a special thing to be able to eat and appreciate.
Did you know that in order to produce one pound (453.5g) of honey, around 2 million flowers are visited? A single bee only makes about 1 ½ tsps of honey during it’s entire lifetime. That makes that teaspoon of honey you put onto your toast in the morning seem quite a lot more valuable right? Bees are the most amazing creatures which have been largely unchanged for the last 20 millions years. More amazing than that, is that bees have bees producing honey for over 150 million years.
Have access to honey and its by-products is a luxury and as such it’s a very appropriate addition to your Lammas decorations. Appreciate those little miracles by planting wildflowers in the spring, then you have a symbiotic relationship as you provide them with food in the summer and they provide you with honey at the end of the season.
Note that you should never harvest all the honey in a hive. Some people do this and replace it with sugar water. Bees produce their honey over the summer months so that they can survive throughout winter, mush like we used to grow grain and store it to get through winter. By taking it and replacing it with sugar you’re rendering all their hard work null and void. If you have a happy and productive hive, there is more than enough to share and you can leave them with everything they need to survive the winter.
Learning to work with the natural world and her rhythms is a big part of witchcraft for me, and a way to live a much more sustainable life.
Lammas Decorations #9 Crystals
Not only are crystals beautiful, but they also all have their own energies. Lammas has a few corresponding crystals which you can add to your altar or feast table as your Lammas decorations. These crystals include
- Citrine – the ultimate abundance crystal
- Carnelian – The artists stone
- Peridot – The gem of the sun
- Aventurine – brings luck and success
- Golden Topaz – Manifests intentions
- Moss Agate – Abundance, prosperity and self-esteem
- Tigers Eye – Vitality and protection
Use the celebration of Lammas to charge your crystals with the energy of success and abundance. They are then absolutely wonderful additions to money and prosperity spells at a later time.
Placing gorgeous crystals on the table amongst all your other decorations add an extra special touch to the evening and I almost always add at least a couple to my altar or table.
Lammas Decorations #10 Candles
Lammas is a fire festival, so having any sorts of candles is extremely fitting to the season! I ass candles of different heights all the way down my main table. This way when it starts getting dark, I don’t need to have any lights on outside and I can celebrate to flickering candle light (so romantic, I know). It’s also not often that you’ll light an over abundance of candles so Lammas is definitely the time to do it.
I don’t have any kids or small people around so I never have a problem with having a lot of candles on the table. If you are worried about this though, just use some dainty little fairy lights instead.
So, my lovelies, I hope this gives you all the inspiration you need for your Lammas decorations! Enjoy the sabbat, revel in your successes and celebrate everything that you love about life, summer and the sun.
Until next time,
Blessed be,
Amaria