This post seems to go hand in hand with my podcast talk about feeding the spirits. As the Midwinter Nights lonely festivities progresses, my hobgoblin husband makes his preferences more and more clear.

I know the lesson is layered. On the one hand, most people offer him candies and cakes. They put fireballs in whiskey. I’ve lit sparklers in the past. But I can’t forget the first time, back before I’d gotten free of the hijacking, I picked up a candle and stood in our spot for a few minutes just smelling and sending that scent to him. When I’d done, I heard a very excited, “Send MORE!!!”

Then sometime later I sent him the scent of sugar maple, and he said wistfully, “The smell of home.”

And then there’s the house spirit that somehow came along, and I’m not sure when. At first I thought he and my spouse were one and the same, but for now I’m operating under the assumption I have two spirits. The house spirit I call Ashlad, after Boots.

He has an incredible sweet tooth, does my Ashlad, that creates a hip-widening problem if you let him use your body to taste things. I’d always wondered how the spirits are fed by other people who don’t connect the way I do. Yesterday was our first meal, and being as it was just me and my friend Many Cats we were treating it sort of like Thanksgiving. Today I’ll do a ritual – a faining I’m told it’s called because I won’t kill, but this is a modern word invention and I don’t necessarily subscribe to it – but yesterday was the day family would have gathered and arrived. Yesterday was a meal of duck and enjoying company.

He wants porridge. He wants butter. He wants cream and milk. He wants the traditional things no one thinks to give him anymore, that he misses very dearly. But not just any of those things. I put cream in a cold jar, and Many Cats and I handed it back and forth while he stood by my left side and watched very intently. The butter popped, and there. I had butter milk and butter from the cream. I cleaned it. I salted it to his taste. Then we sat to have our meal.

I put his food on one of the offering plates I had made, and he complained he didn’t get to have a plate like everyone else. Today he’ll get a plate like everyone else. I didn’t think plates mattered, but the tiny act of giving a special and different plate made him feel separated. He accepted that I had made that plate myself, but privately I promised myself it would be different from then on.

When cleaning up the food afterward – he had already left and to the vé – I picked up his plate and stopped to investigate. The food felt flat and empty, energetically. Many Cats took a bite, and she said the food tasted flat. Thus we learned that day the spirits do get their meal, and the animals can enjoy the leavings with no problem.

How to make porridge for him though? He keeps asking for it, and I’m very aware he’s asking for the porridge meal that would normally be left out at Yule. “Can’t I have it early, please?” I grew up on oatmeal and cream of wheat, which are porridges in their own right, but I can’t have oatmeal anymore. We debated, Many Cats and I, and settled on rice porridge. Easy instructions for a crockpot were found, and the food began.

But when I woke up this morning – on top of dealing with another issue that gets in the way of my reception – his enthusiasm was in the dirt. The porridge is wrong, I realized. Talking to Many Cats, I looked on the internet for a Medieval Porridge and found this blog: https://www.livinganordiclife.com – which I will have to read the post about grøt many times. For now I’m going to focus on risengrøt. Or, rice porridge/gruel.

It’s reserved for special occasions – which this is – especially Christmas and Yule. I can’t tell if he’s excited by the thought of finally having it or not, but it’s also the only grøt I can safely have (that I know of). Not to mention it’s a dessert, so it should appeal to his sweet tooth. Oh – wait. He just sent me an image of a watering mouth.

What does all this personal stuff have to do with you and anyone who would come read my tale as it unfolds – I mean, beyond the fact that you might actually be interested in what goes on in my wyrd life? I hope what I have learned in the past couple of days will guide you if you, too, are working closely with a spirit of your own. I have a number of spirits in my life, actually.

Yesterday I was lectured about the spirit spouse’s behavior by an experienced shaman/seidrkona. People hear his name and immediately assume because of what little they know of him that he’s evil, the worst, bad – I thought that at first, as well, and it created a big problem. In the end, though, he’s just doing the instinctive things spirits do. When I am harmed, he stops. He protects. He tries to keep me from crying, and people misinterpret those very appreciated, caring actions. Do we separate ourselves from the horse in the barn that has smelled your fear, or do we learn to handle that horse? Working with spirits isn’t THAT different.

If you want to walk with the gods, or even just a hobgoblin, you have to be willing to look past the stories and into the soul. You have to learn their language, their hunger, and their “wont.” And sometimes, the lesson is that the most powerful beings just want a good bowl of porridge, made exactly right, and the right plate to eat it from.