Baba Yaga, my favourite iconic figurine...

Being of Russian/Polish ancestory, and a wisewomantraditionist to boot, this green crone identifies bigtime with the wild woman in the woods who had a house with chickenlegs...... lol... I have been collecting images of witches and little icons of witches for years. I'm fascinated by how the Chinese dollar store industry has latched onto the consumerist west's insatiable need to buy Halloween stuff so that now its as crazy as when Xmas rolls around... so many aisles from as early as August in stores like Value Village... and how they translate our cultural relativity, through their Asian lens and then sell us what 'we need', which is these Euro images of the hook nosed, black wearing, cone hatted, scraggly haired, green faced scary humpbacked witch...

I make a point, and will till the day I die, to let whoever I'm purchasing my yearly witch from (I only allow myself one per year, and she better be a doozy) to regale my clerk with how green witches came to be this comical caricature of what was looked upon as the wiser women of the time and is now almost stigmatized with tags like 'evil' or 'sorceress', when they were actually healers, midwives, beer brewers, bakers, farming women... The fact that they have green faces indicates that this is after the Spanish Inquisition. The green bruises, and broken noses, knocked out teeth and hunched backs were from the torture those wise women endured. When you find witches with pink and rosy complections, you know you can date them from that same era, but before the Malleus Mallefacarum was adopted by the Church, when the Witch hunters would reign terror on small rural communities, bullying them out of assets in the name of their God.

So, the moral of my little rant, is tell your daughters this story. Pass it on. Women need to know these things.