Monthly Archives: January 2014

Jan 12 2014
3 Comments
Christmas, Copperman's Day, Epiphany, Plough Monday, St. Distaff's Day

Plough Monday & Copperman’s Day

Copperman

Come tomorrow, the first Monday after Epiphany, we get another of the old agricultural post Christmas “get back to work” celebrations from England. This time, it’s the guys who are back to work with a ceremonial ploughing of the frozen ground on Plough Monday.

Truth be told, Plough Monday is not very much about work at all. It does, however, mark the day the lads return to ordinary time now that Christmas is passed, much like St. Distaff’s Day did for the lasses last week on January 7, the day after Epiphany. It is an old holiday rooted in the centuries that fell out of favor for some time but is seeing a bit of a revival again. You can be sure there was ale involved back in the old days. It was, as well, another big day for mummers and guisers performing street plays. It was perhaps their last hurrah for the winter, and the typical Plough Monday mummers play had the ever present theme of life and death and rebirth––cycles that are very present and familiar to those who are close to the land.

Mummers or not, the day did typically see the local men dressed so as to evoke the fool. The sillier the better and all topsy-turvy, with shirts on top of coats and all bedecked with ribbons, too… a remnant of that Feast of Fools atmosphere that permeates much of the Twelve Days of Christmas. One of the men would dress as an old woman: the Bessy, who perhaps again personifies the old hag of winter, the goddess in her wise crone stage. The men and Bessy would parade through the village with a finely decorated plough, raising a general ruckus of song and cheers and dances (some truly ancient and mysterious ones, like the Sword Dance) and the blowing of horns and the banging of drums, and always in procession, too, the collection box, into which folks were expected to drop a few coins for the Plough Monday merriment. Those who didn’t might have their front yards subjected to the plough. But this mischief was rare; most everyone gave a little something to the sport, and the celebration was, for the most part, a benign and happy one as it progressed through town.

The first Monday after Epiphany marks the date of another obscure holiday, this one from Holland: Copperman’s Day. Convivio Bookworks is, at heart, a print shop, so Copperman’s Day is rather close to our hearts, for it is a printer’s holiday. It was a day when printers’ apprentices got the day off to work on their own projects and to show off the printing skills they had learnt to date in the course of their apprenticeships. They would sell these printed works in exchange for a copper, hence the name, Copperman’s Day. It’s a Dutch tradition that seems fit for revival what with the current renewal of interest in letterpress (and the handmade in general), and perhaps we’re doing our part by beginning an annual Convivio Bookworks Copperman’s Day keepsake. Our inaugural Copperman’s Day print will, if all goes as planned, be available by nightfall on the holiday, or soon after. Here’s to new traditions!

 

Jan 07 2014
Christmas, Epiphany, St. Distaff's Day

St. Distaff’s Day

Distaff

Christmas is over and it’s back to work. St. Distaff’s Day falls each January 7, the day following Epiphany, to remind us of the shift back to ordinary time. The return to work comes not without a little celebrating, though. Our oft quoted Book of Days poet Robert Herrick wrote the poem that best explains the holiday. It’s a poem from his 1648 book Hesperides, called “Saint Distaff’s Day, or the morrow after Twelfth Day.”

Partly worke and partly play
Ye must on St. Distaff’s Day:
From the Plough soone free your team;
Then come home and fother them.
If the Maides a-spinning goe,
Burne the flax, and fire the tow:
Scorch their plackets, but beware
That ye singe no maiden-haire.
Let the maides bewash the men.
Give St. Distaff all the right,
Then bid Christmas sport good night;
And next morrow, every one
To his owne vocation.

In truth, St. Distaff’s Day marked the day when women traditionally got back to work, especially at their spinning. The men still have a few days to go (quite a few this year, as Plough Monday, their traditional return-to-work day, is near a week away).

Perhaps the oddest thing about St. Distaff’s Day is the fact that there is no St. Distaff. The distaff is not a person at all but a tool that is part of the process of spinning wool or flax into thread, which is the first step to making cloth. The distaff and spindle were the tools that preceded the spinning wheel. Spinning was so associated with women’s work that the word spinster, which is happily not much used these days, once was a recognized legal term in England to describe an unmarried woman, and the terms spear side and distaff side were also legal terms to distinguish the inheritance of male from female children. Any woman who spun thread (and that would have been most women in earlier times) would know the distaff well.

St. Distaff’s Day was a day for mischief: yes, the women were trying to get back to their spinning, but the men, meanwhile, were there attempting to set fire to their flax. Of course, in the women’s attempts to put out the fires, many a bucket of water was tossed upon the mischievous men on St. Distaff’s Day.

Nowadays, perhaps it’s best to mark the day as one in which we acknowledge the shift from Christmas, a period outside of time, to the regular workaday world: ordinary time… but doing so with some measure of ceremony. Partly work and partly play and why not? Get back to work, but have a little fun, too.

 

Jan 06 2014
Christmas, Epiphany, La Befana, Solstice, The Gift Bearers

An Epiphany

Magi

TWELFTH DAY of CHRISTMAS:
Epiphany

It’s Epiphany, the day the Magi arrived in Bethlehem to see the child. Children in Italy have awoken to presents delivered over the course of the night by la befana, and in Spain and throughout Latin America, los tres reyes, the three kings, have done the same job. Today, la befana will be back to her housework, back to her sweeping, sweeping the holidays away until the winter solstice returns again next December. An old Italian saying sums it up: E l’epifania tutte le feste porta via.

Most of what we know of the Magi comes down through tradition and not through biblical writings. The story is that there were three wise men and that their names were Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, but in fact we don’t know their names for sure or how many there were. We do know, however, that there were three gifts. It’s an old, old story that we know well. The Magi followed the star, finally arrived at the place where Jesus lay, paid homage to him, and brought gifts to the child, gifts fit for royalty: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Epiphany is a Greek word, meaning “manifestation.” The local shepherds were the first to come see the child in the manger, but with the Magi, who came from far off kingdoms, the child was made manifest to the world. Epiphany has another meaning, as well, one that James Joyce spoke of, in which characters in stories, people in general, suddenly see things differently. The two kind of go hand in hand. Nothing would ever be the same after that first Christmas night, and nothing is ever the same after a personal epiphany, either.

And so with this night, our celebration of Christmas winds down. While Twelfth Night brings us raucous revelry, Epiphany is generally quieter. The day will proceed much like any other––here in the United States, for most of us it’s just another day at work. Even the Church in this country moves the date of Epiphany to a Sunday (it was yesterday by most church calendars), but traditionalists prefer to keep its date as it always was. In this house, we will celebrate with a quiet dinner. We’ll enjoy the music and the greenery and lights for one last night. And some time in the still quiet of this night, we’ll gather up the people in our home, step out onto the front porch, bundle up if it’s cold outside, and we’ll take turns writing with chalk above the front door the numbers and letters of a traditional inscription: 20+C+M+B+14. These are the initials of each of the Magi, punctuated by crosses and surrounded by the year. The chalk is supposed to be blessed chalk, but I doubt there are many priests left who remember this old tradition and who bother to bless chalk for their congregations, so I think any chalk would be fine, blessed or not. The writing is usually accompanied by a silent prayer that we’ll all be together to do this again next year. The inscription, a magic charm of protection and a reminder of the season, remains there for all to see and it weathers the year, sometimes washing away to a ghost of itself by the following year, and sometimes remaining as vibrant as ever.

After tonight, we might light the candles in our windows, but the Christmas lights outside will no longer be lit. All the greenery and the tree are to be removed. If you have the room, perhaps you can save your tree in a quiet corner of your garden. Just tuck it away there, off to the side, and next December, do what we do: use that tree to fuel your fire on the darkest night of the year that comes when the Winter Solstice returns next December. This is, I think, an honorable way to send off the tree that has brought your family so much joy this year, and continues the spiraling circle of time and seasons that gave that tree life in the first place. The tree, you, the Magi, the child, all are part of this same spiral.

Image: Three kings brought to us as gifts by our neighbors Don and Pat Cortese, Twelfth Night 2013. 

 

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