Author Archives: John Cutrone

Dec 26 2020
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Christmas, Kwanzaa, Yule

First Day of Christmas: Banish Grief

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. A strange Christmas, to be certain. If there has ever been a need for a Slow Christmas, it is now, this year, when we are feeling so bewildered and so disconnected from each other and from the traditional round of the year.

Here is what’s happening in corporate-driven culture this 26th of December, which has its way of trickling down to the culture of home: the stations on satellite radio that began playing Christmas music way back in October have abruptly stopped. Why they begin playing this stuff in October is anyone’s guess, and why they unplug it just as Christmas has begun has always felt bizarre to me, but Sirius XM has yet to consult with me on these matters. (Perhaps next year.) In stores, it is traditionally a day to pick up some bargains on holiday merchandise, though this year I think you’d be lucky to find anything left since Christmas, apparently, was just what we needed in this pandemic time. And you may begin to see unwanted Christmas trees tossed out on the curb as early as today, and certainly more and more as these next few days progress (especially after New Year’s Day).

My job as a Yuletide Traditionalist is to encourage you to slow down a bit. To that end, I’m going to encourage you to celebrate the next twelve days with me as the Twelve Days of Christmas, and to celebrate a proper close to the season come Twelfth Night and Epiphany, and to consider the spirit of Yuletide even in the days beyond on the road to Candlemas (a little known Christian holiday, at least here in the States) and Imbolc (another little known holiday, being its older Pagan counterpart) at the start of February.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s begin by backing up a day or two, and in case you missed it, here is a link to my Convivio Dispatch from Lake Worth, written in the dark night hours of Christmas Eve. Let’s use that to set the stage for the next twelve days, for here begins a period of time traditionally considered outside ordinary time: We enter the Twelve Days of Christmas. And this seems, of course, a good time to tackle the first controversy, and so here it is: There are two schools of thought on how to calculate the Twelve Days of Christmas. Is Christmas Day the First Day of Christmas? Some say yes, but we in this house subscribe to the venerable school of thought that places the first six days of Christmas in the old year and the next six days of Christmas in the new. Our ancestors loved the kind of magic that comes with numerical balance. It seems highly irregular to me that they would have felt right about a 12-day celebration, straddling two distinct years, that had seven days in one year and five in the next. But a balanced bridge that leads us out of one year and into a new one? Placing six days in the old year, six days in the new makes for an exquisite, beautiful balance. This is the sort of symbolism for which our ancestors strove… especially for an extraordinary time traditionally seen as outside the everyday. So when we talk about the Twelve Days of Christmas here, it is always inside this framework of balance. And so we come today to the First Day of Christmas.

FIRST DAY of CHRISTMAS
St. Stephen’s Day, Boxing Day, Day of the Wren

On this First Day of Christmas, Father Christmas brings Boxing Day, celebrated in England and the Commonwealth countries. Servants typically had to work on Christmas Day, but the First Day of Christmas was their day to spend with their families. Their employers would send them home with boxes of gifts for themselves and for the families they were heading home to. Perhaps more important, though, it is St. Stephen’s Day. Stephen was the first Christian martyr, and so the Church assigned this first day of Christmas to him. In Italy, Santo Stefano’s Day is a big deal. Christmas Day is for family, but Santo Stefano’s Day traditionally is a day to bundle up and go out to visit friends and to visit nativity scenes. It is a day for roasted chestnuts and mulled wine (as is tomorrow, St. John’s Day: the Second Day of Christmas). My Aunt Anne and my mom say that my grandmother, Assunta, typically made soup for supper on this First Day of Christmas, when we remember Santo Stefano. The soup was a nice break from the rich fare of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Over in Ireland, it is the Day of the Wren. It is the wren that is traditionally thought to have brought bad luck upon the imprisoned Stephen, who was making his escape when a wren alerted the sleeping guards to the situation. His capture lead to his execution and martyrdom. Wrens were traditionally hunted on this First Day of Christmas, then paraded around town––we don’t subscribe to this sort of thing and I think it’s rare to find anyone doing it nowadays… but it’s good you know the history, no?

PREPARING for these TWELVE DAYS
There are common themes that run throughout Yuletide now that it is here, the heart of which is conviviality, the source of our Convivio Bookworks name. Being a pandemic time, it’s not the ideal time for such a thing, but certainly there can be conviviality within your home, and I don’t see why these Twelve Days couldn’t be celebrated with friends and family across newer channels, like Zoom or Skype. So don’t lose sight of the convivial aspect of the season.

There are certain pantry items that are good to have on hand this Christmastime. First: chestnuts for roasting. Just like ice cream is part of summer, roasted chestnuts, for us, anyway, are part of Christmas. Spirits, in the form of red wine and cider and Christmas ale (if you drink these things) are second, for many of the Twelve Days of Christmas customs call for these things. (Don’t get carried away, now: the Puritans banned Christmas because it was, in their day, a time of drunken revelry. If there’s anything we despise, it is extremism in either direction. We don’t advocate drunken revelry, but we do advocate moderation and enjoyment.) Third: stock up on unusual ingredients that you may not necessarily have (and if you do, it may be time to replace them). Things like mulling spices, honey, and rose water will come in handy as the celebrations of the Twelve Days of Christmas progress. You’ll find excellent quality mulling spices and rose water at our catalog, made by the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community. (Locals, use discount code PICKUP at checkout and the $8.50 shipping charge will be deducted from your order. We’ll arrange a time for you to come by our front porch for pick up, or, if you live in the 33460 zip code, I’ll be happy to make a delivery to your house by bicycle. Everyone else: we ship via USPS Priority Mail, which is two days to most destinations in the country.)

It is my sincere wish that you will join us in celebrating Christmas through all these days, to the season’s close on Epiphany, the 6th day of January. If your heart truly loves Christmas, do things in your own time, and know that in many traditions, Christmas is a season that carries on all the way to Candlemas, on the 2nd of February, and that is typically how we go about the season here. But we are a couple of old softies who love Christmas dearly. Do what feels right to you, that’s my recommendation. Even if it seems out of step with everyone else around you (because it can feel that way––but hopefully you are all wise enough to not care about things like that). Celebrate this way, and know that at the very least you have two odd fellows in Lake Worth joining you in spirit and raising their glasses with you throughout the season. And that’s not so bad.

KWANZAA
December 26 also begins the first of seven nights of Kwanzaa, the celebration of African American culture that, like Advent and Chanukah, involves an ever increasing source of candlelight during the dark nights of the Midwinter solstice. It is a relatively new celebration, as holidays go, introduced in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Kurenga, who placed the celebration at Midwinter in direct response to the commercialism he saw in Christmas. Kwanzaa begins December 26 and runs through the First of January, with each day focusing on one of seven principles: first, umoja (unity); then kujichagulia (self-determination); next, ujima (collective work and responsibility); followed by ujamaa (cooperative economics); and then nia (purpose); kuumba (creativity); and finally imani (faith). Dr. Kurenga’s wish was for African Americans to be proud of their heritage and culture. That is a noble thing indeed.

Images: Our punchbowl gets a lot of use this time of year. It’s a lovely old ceramic punchbowl, made in England, probably close to a hundred years old. The verse in the first photograph is at the bottom of the bowl, visible once the punch has been drunk, and the scene in the second photograph is one of three that illustrate the verse, both in the bowl and on the cups. The verse reads:

Fill your cups and banish grief,
Laugh and worldly care despise;
Sorrow ne’er will bring relief.
Joy from drinking will arise:
So pour this full and sup it up,
And call for more to fill your cup.

 

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Dec 20 2020
6 Comments
Advent, Midwinter, Solstice, Yule

Midwinter

And now it is Midwinter, and I am here to tell you again the same story, the story I tell you each year on this darkest night. It never grows old (I don’t think so, anyway), for it is the story of our home, our planet, our place in this vast mysterious universe. It is a story rooted in science and perhaps in divinity and certainly in celestial mechanics: at about 5:02 AM––early Monday morning here in Lake Worth, which is in Eastern Standard Time now––the planet will reach its solstice moment. The sun, which has been tracking further and further south on the horizon since last June, appears to stand still for a few days––tracking no farther south. And herein lies the etymology of the word solstice: sol = sun; stice = static, stand still. By Tuesday, already, things will begin to shift the other way, and we will be on our slow and patient way toward summer.

Ah, but that is already the future, and tonight it is the present we are concerned about. It is the Midwinter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere: our longest night of the year, our shortest day. Out of these darkest nights come our deepest joys: all of the celebrations of Midwinter that have come to pass and that are on the horizon. The feasts of St. Nicholas, of Santa Lucia, and of Our Lady of Guadalupe; the eight nights of Chanukah; the ever increasing light of Advent, and still ahead, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and the Twelve Days of Christmas that follow. These are days and nights of adding our light to the sum of light, of understanding that joy comes out of our countering what is dark with light.

The science behind all this is the simple fact that our planet rotates on its axis at a tilt of about 23.5 degrees. As we spend our year revolving around the sun, the pole that is tilted toward the sun experiences spring and summer, the pole that is tilted away experiences autumn and winter. Were it not for that 23.5 degree tilt, we would have no seasons. The round of the year would not be the same, would it? We would lack that constant rearrange––each day slightly different from the one before and the one to come. Experienced day by day, the change is not terribly noticeable. Stack them up and view them as a year, though, and our world turns upside down with change. Many of us are not fond of change (I can be like that), and yet our planet is constantly in flux. Nothing stays the same, and yet nothing really changes. That is the paradox of our round of the year, and that is the paradox of a tilted axis, too. It is sublime, and divine, and it is the beauty of physics and science. How wonderful (how completely filled with wonder) is that?

Image: Earth daylight distribution on the December 2020 Solstice (Northern Winter; Southern Summer) as seen on w:SpaceEngine. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

 

Dec 12 2020
4 Comments
Advent, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Santa Lucia, The Gift Bearers

Sacred Candlelight

Such a sacred act, lighting a candle. That concentrated energy in the spark of the wooden match striking the flint, a small explosion of illumination, lighting the wick that burns the tallow. Like many things of wonder, it is an act that is potentially dangerous, and yet, kept in control, a thing of extreme beauty. So many of our sacred nights here at our home are illuminated by candlelight. (Perhaps they all are sacred: for months now, since this time of isolation began, Seth has been lighting candles at the dinner table each night.)

As I write this today, it is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and in the overnight hours as this day becomes the next, Sankta Lucia will arrive, too, with a wreath of candles upon her head, illuminating the dark cold night, this night that “walks with heavy steps.” I can picture all of the glass Guadalupe candles that are so ubiquitous in shops here in Lake Worth––from Botanica shops to the grocery store aisles––illuminated, too. Some folks are lighting Chanukah candles, and on the Advent wreath this Sunday, we illuminate two purples candles and the rose candle, too, for it is Gaudete Sunday, the Sunday of Advent where we add a measure of joy to our time of reflection. It is difficult to contain the joy that we know is coming with Christmas, and so the colors for this next week of Advent take on the joyful color of rosy pink, rather than somber purple.

And so here we are, practically midway through December already. The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on the 12th of December is sacred to all the countries of Latin America, but most especially to Mexico. As the story goes, in 1531, a fellow named Juan Diego was on a hill near Mexico City and there he saw an apparition of a woman. She asked him to build a church in her honor there on the hill. She spoke to him in his native Nahuatl language and he recognized her, by the things she told him, as the Virgin Mary. And it was on 12th of December in that year that the iconic image of Our Lady of Guadalupe that we know so well miraculously appeared inside Juan Diego’s cloak: on one of his visits to the hill, Mary told Juan Diego to go to the barren top of the hill, but when he got there, he found it not at all barren but covered with roses, all in bloom. He and Mary gathered the roses and she arranged them inside his cloak. And on this, her feast day, Juan Diego opened his cloak before the bishop of Mexico City. When he did, the flowers all fell to the floor, revealing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The bishop took it as a sign. The church was built, and the image from Juan Diego’s cloak, or tilma, hangs still inside the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Tepeyac Hill, Mexico City.

The 13th, a Sunday this year, brings St. Lucy’s Day: the Feast of Santa Lucia in Italy (where Lucia is pronounced loo-chee-a) and Sankta Lucia in Sweden (where the C is soft: loo-see-a). Lucia is sacred to both countries; she was born and lived and died in Sicily, but––perhaps because the nights are so dark in Sweden in December––she was long ago taken up there and celebrated. Lucia = Light, and light is a precious commodity to come by near the Arctic Circle around this time of the approaching Midwinter Solstice.

In Italy, children will wake up in the morning to find tiny presents tied to their shoelaces, as long as they’ve left hay and carrots in their shoes before they went to bed, for Santa Lucia’s donkey. Santa Lucia follows St. Nicholas as the next of the Midwinter gift bearers. In Sweden, typically there are processions on this night in celebration of Sankta Lucia: in churches, in schools, in city streets, on national television. Each features a Lucia, donning a wreath of glowing candles upon her head, with scores of her attendants: boys and girls dressed all in white, each bearing a candle, and then the Star Boys, each carrying stars on poles and donning tall white conical caps. It is one of the most beautiful sights of these ever-darkening nights on the approach to the solstice. In homes, too, Lucia will come in the early morning darkness, wreath glowing upon her head, delivering strong coffee and saffron scented buns, lussekatter, to all in the household.

It is a time that gets jumbled up in our home (and perhaps many other places, too) with things both Italian and Swedish. Even the music for this night is jumbled, for the song that is sung throughout Sweden this night (click here to listen) is Italian in origin, an old Neapolitan melody, transformed and rewritten for a place where, at this darkest time of the year, the night is vast:

The night walks with heavy steps around farm and cottage.
Around the earth, forsaken by the sun, shadows are lowering.
Then into our dark house she treads with lighted candles,
Sankta Lucia, Sankta Lucia.

The night is vast and mute. Now here reverberate
in all silent rooms a rustle as of wings.
See, on our threshold stands––whiteclad, lights in her hair––
Sankta Lucia, Sankta Lucia.

“The darkness will soon take flight from the valleys of earth.”
Thus she a wonderful word to us speaks.
The day shall again, reborn, rise from a rosy sky,
Sankta Lucia, Sankta Lucia.

On Sunday morning, my sister will make her Santa Lucia wreath––a sweet yeast bread, braided and round, a never ending circle like the circle of days, dotted with candied cherries and illuminated with four red candles. Another simple yet delicious treat we have but once each year, and we’ll enjoy it tonight with coffee after dinner. This is our Santa Lucia way.

All of us here––my mom, my sister, Seth and me––we wish you light and peace on these sacred illuminated midwinter nights.

Image: My sister Marietta’s Santa Lucia Bread. I wish we could pour you some coffee and cut a slice for you!

 

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