Author Archives: John Cutrone

Apr 02 2018
Book of Days Calendar, Easter

Good Companions, and Your April Book of Days

Easter brought in April this year. In my family, Easter is one of those holidays that requires days of preparation followed by a good six or seven hours at the table. It begins with the felatta, a traditional platter of cured meats and cheeses and thick fresh orange slices, baskets of two different kinds of homemade taralli (Grandma Cutrone’s and Grandma DeLuca’s), pizza rustica––a savory pie of meats and cheeses and eggs, and dishes of fresh local mozzarella and ricotta. There are the hard boiled eggs, brightly colored, and we have egg fights with them to see whose eggs remain uncracked when they are pitted against each other, tip to tip and butt to butt… and so there are lots of eggs to eat, too. This alone goes on for a good hour and change. And this is just the first course.

So forgive me, I didn’t get to the April edition of your monthly Convivio Book of Days calendar until today, Easter Monday. Which, yes, is a national holiday in many fine countries (like Italy, France, Germany, Canada, and Iceland), mostly in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. I didn’t include Easter Monday on the calendar, but you will find a few interesting days, mostly toward the end of the month, as well as a real favorite day for many of you: Våffeldagen, or Waffle Day––a more populist name for the Feast of the Annunciation (known yet again as Lady Day). It’s typically on the 25th of March, but in years when the feast falls on Palm Sunday (as it did this year), Palm Sunday takes precedence and Lady Day is moved to the Monday after the Second Sunday of Easter. Which this year happens to be April 9th… so plan now on eating waffles that day.

Your best bet? Print out the April Convivio Book of Days (it’s a PDF, after all, designed to be printed on standard US Letter paper), pin it to your bulletin board, and use it as a companion to the blog (and as a good reminder to enjoy waffles on April 9). This month’s cover star is rather angelic, and that’s a good companion to have, as well. Enjoy.

 

Mar 30 2018
7 Comments
Easter, Easter Triduum, Good Friday, Holy Week, Passover

Light

I’ve been off from work this past week, and it was a wise move, taking off for Holy Week. The days were spent on projects and in preparation. I got to spend time with Seth and with the cat as I finished binding a book that someone had ordered and got to work in earnest once more on the book proposal for the Convivio Book of Days. I started fresh, fresh like spring, and I feel better about the proposal I’ve begun this week, much better than the one I began last fall. My friend Cricket gave me a bag of coffee as inspiration for my writing, and all that’s left is enough for one cup: the cup of coffee I will have when I send her the finished proposal.

We also got to help my mom and sister with Easter baking and we got to go on our annual Holy Thursday night pilgrimage of three churches. It was Seth and me on that pilgrimage and we were out late into the moonlit night. So beautiful. And this year I got to do something I had never done before: I went to church for Good Friday. And that was fine, church was. But the sermon made me uncomfortable and I felt a bit disconnected, until it was all over, when we all left the old church in silence, as we are to do on Good Friday. But as we left, I could hear the sounds of the Creole choir, also from our church. The Creole congregation were in the midst of the Stations of the Cross, outdoors on the sidewalk in front of the older church building, the one from the late 1800s. Their music drew me in and I gathered round the old church with them, leaning up against a live oak tree. They were at the final station. There was wailing and sorrow and there was singing I had never heard before but which sounded so familiar. They made their way then to the main church, the larger, newer one, the one built in 1913. They entered, singing, and I went on my way, content, happier for having run into this extension of myself.

Saturday night, I’ll be back, for the Easter Vigil. It is the hours-long Mass that brings in Eastertide. It can begin only after darkness has fallen, for it is then the third day, which used to confuse me a lot until I realized that different cultures have different ways of reckoning time. No one way is right, for time is such a fluid thing and yet an invention of our making. It will be the beginning of Easter and the second night of Passover, too. We will be there, sitting, standing, kneeling, singing, praying, in a service that will begin in darkness and end in light––a central theme to the Easter Vigil. A fire is kindled and the one light is the source that illuminates all the candles in the church: the candles on the altar, the candles we hold cupped in our hands. We are reminded that light overcomes darkness. We are invited to be that light.

 

Mar 26 2018
4 Comments
Holy Week

Lamentations

Palm Sunday has come and gone and with it, we’ve entered Holy Week. We will begin our preparations for our Easter celebration, buying provisions and baking, but at the same time we enter into the greater solemnity of the days toward that end. In our house, the soundtrack for this week is “Lamentations: Holy Week in Provence” by the Boston Camerata. It is beautiful music, and it feels appropriate for the mix of emotions this week brings. The week will bring us Good Friday, of course, but before it, Holy Thursday, or Maundy Thursday, one of the most beautiful nights each year, when Seth and I make our pilgrimage to three churches in the late hours of night, a custom taught us by my grandmother, Assunta, who also taught us to light candles in each church we visit, though on Holy Thursday, usually you cannot, for often the saints are covered in purple cloth and the only candles lit are the ones that were lit for the night watch. There is a palpable melancholy in the air that night, as we sit and visit and wait. But I like melancholy sometimes. At the night watch on Holy Thursday, all that’s asked of us is to be present, and there is something so lovely about that.

And so this is my wish for us all for this week: simply to be present in our preparations for the celebration of spring and renewal that is to come and open to the beauty. Be it in melancholy or in joy, or hopefully in some melding of the two. This week teaches us, perhaps better than any, that it is necessary to set the stage for joy if we are going to be authentic about singing its praises, and this is something I value immensely.

 

Image: A nighttime image taken one Holy Thursday pilgrimage on the courtyard at St. Edward’s, Palm Beach.

 

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