Sabbat
Nothing is growing yet. Something is stirring, and that is a different thing entirely.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Imbolc belongs to the genuinely old four. It appears in the medieval Irish list of festivals, and Cormac's Glossary around 900 glosses the related word óimelc as ewe's milk — the point in the year when ewes come into milk before lambing. Other readings have been offered: i mbolg, "in the belly", or a root meaning washing and cleansing. The honest position is that the etymology is unsettled, and that any book stating one meaning flatly is being tidier than the evidence.
Layered over it are St Brigid's Day on the first of February and Candlemas on the second. How the saint and the goddess relate is a live scholarly argument rather than a settled fact, and the argument is more interesting than either confident version of it. Where you land does not change what the date is good for.
What it is good for is the interval before anything is visible. Practitioners clean, mend, trim wicks, and speak intentions out loud while there is still nothing to show — which is the difficult part, and rather the point. Southern-hemisphere practice keeps the same work at the start of August.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
Robert Chambers, The Book of Days (1864)
Chambers describes Candlemas as the day the year’s candles were brought to be blessed, and records the weather rhyme attached to it — a bright Candlemas promising more winter, a foul one promising less. He treats the saying as a piece of ordinary farming pessimism rather than prophecy.
Carried forward
Common in contemporary practice
A single candle lit for the length of one honest sentence about what the year is for. Whatever else is done, most practitioners keep the date deliberately small — it is a festival about the size of a thing that has only just started.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.