Author Archives: John Cutrone

Dec 19 2024
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Book of Days Calendar, Midwinter, Solstice

Solstice Coming, or Your Convivio Book of Days for December

Christmas is coming, and Seth and I and our niece Isabella drove up to the Christmas tree lot last night in Downtown West Palm Beach to get a tree. It’s a lot that reminds me always of the tree lot scene in A Charlie Brown Christmas, the one with the search lights piercing the night. There weren’t many trees left to be found: We got one that was too big for our short-ceilinged old home, and when we got it here, Seth had to saw off part of the trunk and snip off part of the spire of the tree, too, so we could stand it up in the living room, and even now, there is barely a wisp of air between the top of the tree and the old plaster ceiling.

After weeks of belatedness for this month’s Convivio Book of Days calendar, it seemed fitting to design a calendar around a painting of Christmas tree sellers, and so here it is: Your printable Convivio Book of Days Calendar for December, cover star being an undated 19th century painting by a Danish artist called David Jacob Jacobsen.

If there is a new year’s resolution for me to make, it is this: to get these calendars prepared each month well in advance of the First of the Month. I’ve been late before, but never this late. My apologies. I apologize, as well, for now having much time to write these days. Opening the new shop last spring has certainly added a new level of busy-ness to my life. But I miss writing, and I am hopeful that once we enter a new year, there will be less to do at the shop, and that things will begin to take on an air of familiarity and repetition. We shall see what we shall see.

Speaking of the shop, if you’re local, the family and I would love to see you this coming weekend for our inaugural Solstice Market. We’ve turned the shop into a lovely European-style Christmas Market, and I think you’ll really enjoy visiting! There will be festive shopping, plus we’ll be serving homemade Struffoli (a classic Italian sweet for Christmas) and our own Löfbergs Coffee from Sweden. There will be good company and good music and a festive atmosphere. And it’s your last chance to visit the shop before Christmas begins. The Solstice Market at Convivio Bookworks is on Saturday & Sunday, December 21 & 22, from 11 AM to 4 PM each day. Please come!

Image: “Selling Christmas Trees” by David Jacob Jacobsen. Painting, unknown date (circa mid- to late-19th century) [public domain via Wikimedia Commons].

 

Nov 11 2024
Book of Days Calendar, Martinmas, Veterans Day

Autumnal Bounty, or Your November Book of Days

Belated again! But just before Hollantide is past, here is your Convivio Book of Days for November. The calendar comes just in time for Martinmas, the Feast of St. Martin of Tours, which marks the official end to the harvest season and the last big religious celebration each year before the start of Advent. It’s also Veterans Day here in the US, Armistice Day elsewhere, marking the signing of the armistice that ended the Great War, or World War I. The cease fire that followed the signing that morning came at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918. We called it Armistice Day, too, until 1954, when Congress replaced the word “Armistice” with “Veterans,” and this is the name we have given this national holiday ever since.

St. Martin of Tours was a veteran, too, but of the Roman army. He was born in 316 in the part of the vast Roman Empire that is now Hungary and became a soldier when he was a young boy. He was part of the imperial calvary (which is why he is often depicted on horseback) and was sent to serve the empire in Gaul (which is now France). At some point, though, Martin had a change of heart: he converted to Christianity and became a pacifist and refused to fight. He was imprisoned for the pacifism he preached, but eventually was released. He became a monk and founded a monastery there in France.

France, of course, is known for wine, and St. Martin, too, has much to do with wine. It is on Martinmas, traditionally, that the new wine each year is first tasted, and French Beaujolais wines are typically released on or around Martinmas. The best known story about good St. Martin involves him meeting a disheveled drunken man shivering in the cold on a bitter winter’s day; Martin saw the man, took off his own woolen cape, cut it in two with his sword, then wrapped one half around the cold man to warm him. In the Middle Ages, he was one of the more popular saints and became a patron saint of all kinds of folks, from tailors to innkeepers to the French monarchy… but perhaps St. Martin is best known as a patron saint of grape growers and winemakers, and even of those who delight in wine.

In Germany, children parade about tonight carrying St. Martin’s Day lanterns. The lanterns and the children brighten the lengthening nights come this time of year, for with Martinmas we find ourselves, by traditional reckoning of time, at the natural start of winter. The living world continues its process of shutting down and receding into itself: going underground. Trees are no longer growing above, but roots below the surface still are growing. And so the connections are strong, these darkening days, between the world of the living and the underworld of the dead.

Of course we honored these days of the dead at the start of the month with Hallowe’en and All Saints and All Souls. But the connection of Martinmas to the days of the dead is just as strong, through memory. Before the change to the Gregorian Calendar, the 11th of November was Samhain, the Celtic New Year, and so Martinmas was also long ago known as Old Hallowe’en, or Old Hallowmas Eve. Another name for Martinmas is Hollantide, and just as Halloween is a corruption of the words All Hallow’s Eve, so is Hollandtide, which comes from Hallowtide: the time of the sacred, the holy––those who have gone before. Many of our contemporary Halloween traditions come out of Hollantide traditions: the carving of turnips (replaced by pumpkins here in America) into Jack o’ Lanterns and the going door to door in search of soul cakes, which has evolved into the trick-or-treating we know today. Martinmas is a proper close to our annual season of remembrance, and with its passing we can focus on what is to come: Thanksgiving, and then Advent––the preparation for Christmas. The day is also a traditional weather marker: If ducks do slide at Hollantide, At Christmas they will swim. / If ducks do swim at Hollantide, At Christmas they will slide. / Winter is on his way / At St. Martin’s Day.

 

A STORY FOR MARTINMAS
I had the pleasure a couple years back of reading for you a slightly spooky tale for Martinmas: a Tirolean tale collected and retold by Diane Goode. The scary factor, to be honest, is quite minimal. It’s a fun story for kids and sleepy adults about a goose and an old woman who doesn’t know what’s good for her; I read the story for the Stay Awake Bedtime Stories series for the Jaffe Center for Book Arts. CLICK HERE for the story (and perhaps you’d like to follow along on Instagram (@stayawakebedtimestories) to learn about new Stay Awake releases).

 

IN THE SHOP NOW: ADVENT CALENDARS & CANDLES
I saw a fully illuminated Christmas tree in a neighbor’s house two nights ago and though it was beautiful, shimmering there in the dark, I had to stop and really think about just what time of year it was. Personally, I like advocating for a “Slow Christmas,” and I encourage you to try this slower approach, too. One of the best ways I know to do so is by keeping the season of Advent before welcoming Christmas. Advent, mind you, doesn’t even begin until the First of December this year, so while that neighbor of mine may very likely be tired of seeing their lovely Christmas tree by Boxing Day, we slower folks will get to appreciate it in its time and through the Twelve Days of Christmas (and for some of us, like us, even to Candlemas). All things in their time, I say.

Shop with us online by CLICKING HERE. And if you’re local, come see us at our new shop all the Saturdays of November from 11 AM to 5 PM at 1110 North G Street in Lake Worth Beach. And we invite you to our inaugural Advent & Christmas Market, the weekend of November 22 through 24! There will be homemade cookies to taste and lots of great shopping ideas. Friday November 22 from 6 to 9 PM, Saturday November 23 from 11 AM to 5 PM, and again on Sunday November 24 from 11 AM to 5 PM. Welcoming you to things like this: that’s one of the greatest joys about having our own shop. We’d love to see you there.

 

Oct 15 2024
Apple Tuesday, Autumn, Book of Days Calendar, Halloween

Brilliant October, or Your October Book of Days

You had probably given up, by now, on any hopes of me delivering news of the Convivio Book of Days Calendar for the month, and yet, here it is. To be honest, it’s been there for quite a while; I’ve just not had a moment to sit down to write and let you know. Be that as it may, I am doing so now. Our cover star this month: “Autumn Woods” and the radiancy that only October brings. Since the month’s beginning we’ve already celebrated Rosh Hashanah and the Feast of the Guardian Angels and the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, with its accompanying blessings of animals (my favorite example this year involved Isabella Rossellini driving two sheep to church in the back of her car), not to mention Yom Kippur and St. Denis’ Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and when you finally get word of this month’s calendar, it will be smack dab in the middle of the month, the 15th of October, which, this year, happens to be Apple Tuesday: a fine day, I think, to enjoy one of those lovelier fruits of the season.

There is much of October still to come, but my favorite of it, of course, is Hallowe’en, which closes the month, and begins our annual season of remembrance. And I know Hallowe’en can be problematic –– not all of you love it as we do here in this house –– but I would like to emphasize that there are two approaches to Hallowe’en and if you are not a fan of this wonderful night, might I suggest that perhaps you’ve been too immersed in the approach that has somehow evolved “spooky” and “spirited” and “mysterious” into axe-wielding murderers and gore and horror. I’m not a fan of that stuff, either. But I choose to exclude it from my Hallowe’en celebration, because it is not quite what the season is all about, is it?

Hallowe’en –– and I do think that apostrophe is gravely important –– is All Hallows Eve. It is remembrance: the first night of a season of remembrance that continues on to St. Martin’s Day on the Eleventh of November. Bring on the mystery and bring on the connexions across time and space and yes, to me, a bit of spookiness is most certainly welcome. Our Hallowe’en, in the odd house that is my memory, is fiddles and barn dancing and perhaps a quilting frolic with a table groaning with autumnal bounty and then, after dinner, ghost stories by the fire. It is trick-or-treating, a journey through the night with fellow trick-or-treaters, a night filled with mysterious sights and sounds. There are sweets –– and plenty of them –– but there are also concord grapes and sputtering baked apples and roasted nuts. In my family tradition, it is the time of year when we make a sacred, penitential dessert that our grandparents made, as did their parents and grandparents before them, since time immemorial. We eat this dessert only this time of year, especially on All Souls Night, and it is made from cooked wheat grains, pomegranate, chopped toasted almonds, and chopped chocolate, all mixed in a bowl and then covered in a syrup that was traditionally made from the last pressings of the grapes from winemaking. The syrup is called Mosto Cotto in proper Italian, though in Lucera, the small city in Puglia from where this strange dish for All Souls Night originates, we call the syrup U Cutto, and the dessert itself we call Cicci Cutto. But that is the Lucerine dialect, just as mysterious as this dessert we eat once a year. The pomegranates surely come from the story of Persephone, who must return to the underground world each autumn, the same underground where our beloved dead reside, and the spices that warm the dessert –– cinnamon and cloves –– warm our hearts and place us firmly in autumn, too.

This, to me, is Hallowe’en. This is the mystery of this time of year, and one of our great joys of autumn.

 

COME SEE US!
We’ve got lots going on this time of year! Maybe one or more of these festive occasions will convince you to come on by and say hello. We love when you do.

BOO BAZAAR
Our Boo Bazaar at the end of September was such a joy, we’ve decided to do it one more time. Come on over to our Lake Worth Beach shop on Wednesday evening, October 16, from 5 to 9 PM for one last Hallowe’en shopping event this month. This BOO BAZAAR will feature great spooky shopping, mysterious music, and my sister’s homemade amazing Baked Apple Cider Doughnut Holes, plus tarot card readings and fortunes told by Madame Marie-Claire. The shop address is 1110 North G Street in Lake Worth Beach, FL 33460. Also take note: our shop, which is usually open on Saturdays from 11 to 4, will only be open for the Boo Bazaar this Wednesday evening, and then won’t reopen again until Saturday, November 9. We’ll be at the following festivals (rather than at the shop):

We return to OKTOBERFEST MIAMI for the event’s second weekend: this Friday, October 18 through Sunday, October 20. That’s at the German American Social Club in Miami. It’s their 67th Oktoberfest: the oldest Oktoberfest in Florida. We were there all last weekend. So much fun! I’ve still got “The Chicken Dance” in my head.

Soon after Oktoberfest, it’ll be time for FLORIDA DAY of the DEAD at Esplanade Park in Downtown Fort Lauderdale. Please note that for that festival, our pop-up shop will be located in a double tent at Esplanade Park where the festival begins, before it processes over to Revolution Live. As such, we are there earlier than other craft tents that will be at the second half of the event. Find our double tent at Esplanade Park from 3 to 8 PM.

AUTUMN SALE ONLINE
At our online store we’re offering $10 off your purchase of $85 or more, plus get free domestic shipping. Just use discount code PUMPKINHEAD at checkout. We’re still adding new items this time of year almost daily… in fact, our fall shipment of specialty foods, candies, and cookies has just arrived! You’ll find new items from Germany for Hallowe’en and Christmas, plus new Advent calendars and candles, too. We’ll be adding those specialty foods from Europe to the online shop very soon. Lots to see! CLICK HERE to shop.

HALLOWE’EN REAL MAIL FRIDAY
Finally, won’t you join me on Zoom for a special Real Mail Fridays letter writing social from the Jaffe Center for Book Arts? It happens to be on Thursday this week, not Friday (since I’ll be at Oktoberfest Miami on Friday), and the music will be a very special soundtrack comprised of the kind of mysterious Hallowe’en and autumnal music I like best. Perhaps you’l like it, as well. We begin at 2 Eastern and end at 5 Eastern and you are free to come and go as you please, but the music will be playing all three hours, save for the occasional break we take for a little chat amongst friends. Folks have been joining in lately from all over the US and Canada, plus Scotland, Romania, and the Philippines (our friend there comes to us from the future, since it is already the next day in her part of the world — how mysterious is that?). CLICK HERE to join us.

 

 

 

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