Book of Days

FIFTH DAY of CHRISTMAS
Bring in the Boar

Soon after I began making letterpress printed limited edition books in 1994, I named my press Red Wagon Press (after the Jane Siberry song “The Life is the Red Wagon”) and that was good, but it turned out there were other Red Wagon Presses out there. All of them were making things I didn’t want you thinking I had made, and by the early oughts Seth and I were on the lookout for a new press name. We tried a few on for size (you could very well have been reading the Factory Bookworks Book of Days), but ultimately it was Convivio Bookworks that won out and that we have kept with these 17 years now. It seemed a good fit in 2003, and still does now, for the name suggests celebration and festivity and an honoring of heritage: all things that we have come to love and try to honor in our work and in our small Lake Worth home.

The Convivio name comes directly from an ancient Christmas carol called “The Boar’s Head Carol”. Do you know it? It is a Macaronic carol, meaning it contains both Latin and another language, in this case English.

The Boar’s head in hand bear I
Bedecked with bays and rosemary
And I pray you, my masters, be merry
Quot estis in convivio! [So many as are at the feast!]

The Boar’s head, as I understand,
Is the rarest dish in all the land
When thus bedecked with a gay garland
Let us servire cantico! [Serve with a song!]

Caput apri defero,
Reddens laudes Domino! [The Boar’s head I bring, giving praises to God!]

Our steward hath provided this
In honor of the King of bliss,
Which on this day to be served is.
In Reginensi atrio! [In the Queen’s Hall!]

Caput apri defero,
Reddens laudes Domino!

It is a carol connected directly to Queen’s College, Oxford. As the story goes, a young student of the university many centuries ago was out in the surrounding woods when he was charged by a wild boar. The student saved himself with the only weapon he had upon him: a dusty old volume of Aristotle, which he shoved down the throat of the charging beast and so brains, in this case, won out over braun. The victorious student then brought the boar’s head back to the college and had it for dinner, to much fanfare… and so the tradition goes. The tradition persists despite wild boar being virtually extinct from Britain since at least the 12th century (long before the story takes place).

Aside from the Queen’s College story and our old Boar’s Head Carol, there are other associations between the boar and these darkest nights of midwinter. To the Celts, the boar was sacred, a gift from the Otherworld, ferocious, feared, respected, and the provider of the great feasts of midwinter. And in the Scandinavian countries, Frey, the sun god, rode across the sky on a boar with golden bristles that shone like rays of the sun.

And so on this day, we are to bring in a great feast: the theme of Yuletide through the ages. Back in more celebratory times, folks would not work at all through the Twelve Days of Christmas. Nowadays, however, most of us return to work soon after Christmas Day. My recommendation? Whatever feast you can conjure for tonight is a good one. It need not be elaborate. But whatever you’re serving, do it with fanfare and celebration and you will be honoring the spirit of this Fifth Day of Christmas. (Here’s a delightfully nerdy suggestion: sing “The Boar’s Head Carol” as you bring your supper to table, but change out the words to reflect what’s on the menu. I’ve done this before with special meals (The crown roast in hand bare I / Bedecked with bays and rosemary), but it works with all sorts of menu items (The mac and cheese in hand bare I / Bedecked with bays and rosemary). It’s Christmastime; go on, be festive.)

Here’s something else you might enjoy: One of our readers, Melissa Wibom in Sunnyvale, California, sent me a few years back a link to a BBC Radio 4 program about Christmas carols. Seth and I listened then, and in the process got hooked. It’s extremely entertaining and informative, but alas, no longer available on the BBC website. So last year, we got the 2 CD set of the full series. Seth and I are not a “Here Comes Santa Claus” or “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” kind of people. Songs like that are all well and good, but they’re not very complex and they don’t have staying power through a full Yuletide season. When we speak about Christmas lasting Twelve Days in this house, our house is filled with the kind of music you’ll hear in this program, which is now available as an audiobook, too. It’s called A Cause for Caroling; it is researched, written, and read by Jeremy Summerly, with lots of great music throughout. You will hear old old carols you may never have heard before, or carols that have some resonance of memory for you, songs you know in your bones and heart if not in your ear.

So go, feast and be merry. Listen and enjoy. You, too, will shout with the likes of Seth and me and all those through the ages hailing this dark and mysterious midwinter time: “Welcome, Yule!”

Image: “Sentimental Ballad” by Grant Wood, 1940, oil on masonite, 24 x 50 inches, New Britain Museum of American Art. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons. As the image may suggest, there’s always someone who doesn’t like Christmas carols. We, however, do. The image also follows something you’ll learn listening to the BBC program: Christmas carols are, by and large, things that came out of pubs, not churches… which may explain why Christmas was banned in Puritan England. Music of the people, earthbound hymns. Cheers!

FOURTH DAY of CHRISTMAS
The Feast of Fools

Six days in the old year, six days in the new: these are the Twelve Days of Christmas. And at this point, chaos begins to ensue. The old year is dying, unraveling before our eyes, disintegrating into chaos and entropy, like a spent star, collapsing in on itself, becoming an exploding supernova. And just as the matter that shoots violently into space from that supernova eventually comes together to form new stars and planets, out of the chaos of the dying year a new year will be born.

We are not fond of chaos, and yet here we are, just a few days before the new year, and the central theme of this Fourth Day of Christmas is one that in its early history covered the full Twelve Days. It is the Feast of Fools, where the normal order of things is ceremoniously reversed. The joker and the jester are in charge; the king and queen serve them. The practice was most prevalent in medieval Europe, and is a direct descendant of the Roman midwinter feast of Saturnalia, which is the source of so many of our Christmas traditions today.

So. Practical ways to incorporate the Feast of Fools today? If you have kids, how about putting them in charge of the day? Let them decide what’s for supper, and when it’s time to go to bed. Work? Why bother? Chaos is everywhere now; there’s no point in working. Maybe you should read (or watch) Alice in Wonderland instead––Lewis Carroll would have loved a day like this. The Lord of Misrule is in charge of the day. Just go with it. There are 364 normal days ahead.

THIRD DAY of CHRISTMAS:
Holy Innocents’ Day, Childremas

Never underestimate the threat of an insecure, self-centered person in a position of power. Today we remember the poor children slaughtered by order of King Herod, the leader of Judea who felt threatened upon hearing the news of the Christ child’s birth. It is traditionally thought of as the most unlucky day of the year. The day was viewed with such great superstition in ages past that it was considered unlucky even to wear new clothes on the Third Day of Christmas, or to clip your fingernails, or to undertake any new project. Best to leave it for the following day, when good luck would return.

I personally don’t respond well to so much negativity, and I don’t agree with allowing an immature, unstable leader in history rob us of our peace and joy today. Doing so gives Herod too much power. I think a more positive approach in remembrance of all those lost that Third Day of Christmas is to honor the children in our lives and the children we once were: to reconnect with a time when we were more willing to suspend disbelief, more willing to be fully immersed in things, as children are wont to be. We leave childhood behind because we have to. But the child you were has certainly informed the adult you’ve become, so there is a thread that resonates across the years. This is something worth nurturing. The happiest, most engaged people I know still retain a measure of the wonder they knew as children.

One of the oldest midwinter traditions in the Church is the election of a Boy Bishop each St. Nicholas’s Day on the Sixth of December. He would be chosen from the choirboys, and he would rule until Childremas, this Third Day of Christmas. The office was serious business. The Boy Bishop wore full vestments and mitre, and he would perform all the duties of a bishop, save for celebrating mass, although he did often deliver the sermons. The actual bishop would, in some places, have to follow the orders of the Boy Bishop. These traditions tap into the ideas of the Feast of Fools, as well, where the normal order of things is ceremoniously reversed (which blends into the customs for the Fourth Day of Christmas, tomorrow), and perhaps relates to the words of the Magnificat: God has put down the mighty from their throne and has exalted the humble and the meek.

In medieval times, the Boy Bishop could be found in most every cathedral in France, Britain and Germany during the Yuletide season. The custom was treated with such seriousness that if he should die while in office, the Boy Bishop received the same burial honors as a real bishop. The 1869 Chambers Brothers’ Book of Days gives mention to one unfortunate Boy Bishop who did come to his end while in office, telling us that a monument to his memory may be found on the north side of the nave at Salisbury Cathedral.

In Spain and Latin America, the Third Day of Christmas is a day for practical jokes, the victims of which being called inocentes, although sometimes it is the prankster that gets that name in a plea for forgiveness. No matter how you spend the day, the theme, it seems, is universal: celebrating and honoring children. If it’s the child inside, how do we go about doing that? Keep it simple, I’d say. Are there favorite things you used to do when you were a kid that you just don’t do anymore? What was your favorite book back then, or your favorite movie, or your favorite thing to eat? Today, Childremas, is a good day to go back and give those things another try. Make it a playdate with the child you were. Get yourselves reacquainted.

Image: “Children by the Christmas Tree” by Leopold Graf von Kalckreuth. Oil on canvas, c. early 20th century. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.