Author Archives: John Cutrone

Feb 09 2024
2 Comments
Chinese New Year, Losar

Year of the Wood Dragon

The new moon is in the sky now and Chinese Lunar New Year has begun, and so has Losar, the new year in the Tibetan tradition. This new year in both traditions is the Year of the Wood Dragon. Dragon is the fifth of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, and here is how that came to be: When the Jade Emperor announced that the order of the zodiac animals would be determined by when they each arrived at his palace, Rabbit figured, “I’ve got this in the bag!” Rabbit knew he was fast, and he was pretty proud of his speed. Some (Ox, especially) might say Rabbit was even a little arrogant about it. Rabbit in particular made fun of Ox, who was his neighbor, for Ox, though he took great strides, was mighty slow compared to Rabbit.

On the day of the Jade Emperor’s race, Rabbit set off at daybreak. Sure enough, he was the first to arrive outside the Jade Emperor’s palace. But Rabbit hadn’t counted on having such a tough time crossing the river, which made him a bit tired, and so, as none of the other animals were in sight, he opted to have a little snooze while he waited for the others to catch up. And so Rabbit took a nap under a tree just outside the gate. Which is all well and good, I suppose… but while Rabbit slept, three other animals arrived and entered the palace. Ox was one of them, but ahead of Ox came Rat, for Rat had tricked Ox into giving him a ride and leapt off of Ox and into the palace first. Ox followed in, and behind Ox came Tiger. Only after Tiger’s entrance did Rabbit awaken from his nap… and this is how Rabbit came to be the fourth animal of the Chinese Zodiac and why Rat is first, and why Ox is second, and why Tiger is third, ahead of the rabbit.

Next came our dragon, who soared gracefully into the palace as he descended from the clouds. The Jade Emperor was perplexed as to how Dragon had not come in first in the race, for Dragon certainly had the advantage of flight. But Dragon explained: he was delayed on his journey through the sky for he could see, from his high vantage point, a fire burning in a farmer’s field, and so Dragon stopped to help the farmer by bringing rain to extinguish the fire. And, though Rabbit didn’t realize it, Dragon also stopped along the way to help Rabbit in his travails by blowing him across the river safely to the opposite shore. Touched by the dragon’s kindnesses, the Jade Emperor welcomed him in as the fifth animal of the zodiac.

The snake, the horse, the goat, the monkey, the rooster, the dog, and the pig all followed the dragon, but this year is Dragon’s year, and the element associated with Dragon this year is wood, and it’s the first Wood Dragon year since the year I was born. If you are a fellow Wood Dragon, our characteristics are: Introverted (check), not terribly enthusiastic (that doesn’t describe me at all), not so great with relationships (I don’t think that describes me, either), and despite our introverted nature, we tend to do quite well when thrust into the limelight (and that does, oddly enough, describe me: I can do pretty well on a stage or speaking to a large group of people, even though all I want to do, up to the moment the light shines on me, is run away).

Dragon is the most unusual of the Twelve Animals of the Zodiac in that he is the only mythological animal. In the West, we historically have considered dragons dangerous and frightening, but I prefer the Eastern view of dragons as helpful, beneficial, and lucky creatures to have nearby. That may just be my inner dragon speaking. Perhaps it’s another quality of Wood Dragons? I tend to approach the world with curiosity, rather than with fear. That may be a character flaw, but it’s so far served me well.

Speaking of fear: Many Chinese Lunar New Year traditions come out of an ancient legend in which a monster called Nian would come out of hiding as each year came to a close, and Nian’s favorite thing to do at the end of the year was to scare people. But the good people discovered that there were three things that scared Nian: the color red, the bright lights of illuminated lanterns, and the loud crackling of burning bamboo. All three of these things are part of the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration. Red is the color of good fortune, lanterns illuminate the night time sky, and the burning bamboo is now replaced with firecrackers. But let me tell you something: Seth and I, just a few weeks ago, thinned out one of the stands of bamboo growing in our backyard and we had so much cut bamboo in piles in the yard that one cold night this winter, we decided to have a little bamboo bonfire in the copper fire bowl. We had never burnt bamboo before. It burns with astonishing and amazing pops, as each inner chamber heats up and explodes. Each and every loud POP made us both shriek. Even a half hour in, when it was pretty obvious this would be happening, each new POP made us yell out. We couldn’t stop laughing. And it’s pretty obvious now, as Chinese Lunar New Year begins, that these loud pops would scare off a monster like Nian.

Last year at this time, Seth and I made homemade dumplings for the new year celebration. They were so good, but I am sick right now with a cold and I don’t know that I have it in me to make homemade dumplings this time around. But who knows, for the new year celebration continues on through Lantern Festival, when the full moon returns and the celebration concludes. That is on the 24th of February this year. That’s two weeks of red, two weeks of illuminated lanterns, two weeks of potential dumpling making, two weeks of firecrackers and popping bamboo. Enjoy!

 

ONLINE SPECIALS: A COPPERMAN’S DAY SPECIAL, PLUS A VALENTINE SALE!
You’ll find our newest Copperman’s Day print and all our Copperman’s Day prints now at our our online catalog when you CLICK HERE. Order 5 or more of any of our mini prints (Copperman’s Day prints, B Mine Valentines, and our famous Keep Lake Worth Quirky prints) and use the code COPPERMAN when you check out; we’ll take $5 off your order to help balance out our flat rate domestic shipping charge of $9.50.

If you’re doing more serious shopping (and we do have lots to offer if you are), you may instead use discount code LOVEHANDMADE to save $10 on your $85 purchase, plus get free domestic shipping, too. That’s a total savings of $19.50. Spend less than $85 and our flat rate shipping fee of $9.50 applies. Newest arrivals: Letterpress printed Valentine cards in the Valentine section, and check our Specialty Foods section for some incredibly delicious chocolate we found from Iceland, including a particularly Icelandic blend of milk chocolate and licorice. If you love both these things, well… Icelanders long ago discovered that covering black licorice in milk chocolate, then dusting the result in licorice powder, is just amazing. (Trust me: we’re on our third bag so far.)  CLICK HERE to shop; you know we appreciate your support immensely.

 

Image: The Fire Dragon Dance for Chinese Lunar New Year, photographed on the First of February, 2003. Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons, attributed to this source in China.

Feb 07 2024
8 Comments
Copperman's Day, Transitions

Count Your Blessings While You May

Last week, in the late evening quiet of Wednesday night, I finished the final print run of our 2024 Copperman’s Day print. This year’s print is inspired by a lovely concert recorded for the CBC on December 2, 1993, at the Glenn Gould Theatre in Toronto, featuring vocalists Holly Cole, Rebecca Jenkins, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Jane Siberry, and Victoria Williams in an ensemble setting accompanied by Tim Ray on piano. The concert recording takes its name from the opening song: “Count Your Blessings,” which is something we try our best to remember to do. There are days, of course, when we forget this simple act, but coming back to counting our blessings is always the goal.

Copperman’s Day, for us, is an extension of the Christmas season, falling as it does on the First Monday after Epiphany, and Christmas 2023 was a Christmas where we keenly felt the absence of Haden, the Convivio Shopcat. She’d been with us since Labor Day Weekend, 2005, and on the 15th of September, 2023, we had to say our goodbyes. All these weeks and months later, we still miss her terribly. 18 years is a long time, and yet still not long enough. “Count your blessings” were words that went along with Haden. We appreciated every moment we had with her, and Christmas this year has been a bit, or a lot, melancholy, without her striped orange presence. She seemed to love Christmas as much as we do: she loved the tree, she loved perching atop the presents, and she even seemed to love the music (except, perhaps, the CD of Scandinavian and Siberian music we play each Midwinter solstice night… the stomping and whooping would make Haden’s ears twitch a lot and we could often discern a bit of a scowl on her face as the music filled her house).

The “Count Your Blessings” CD was one she liked, and so it felt only right to make this our Copperman’s Day print. The song was written by Edith Temple and Richard Morgan in 1946, and these are the particular lyrics by Edith Temple that pull at the heartstrings each time I hear them:

Count your blessings while you may, For we are here, with little time to stay.

We’ve dedicated this year’s print to our beloved little pal, Haden, who would visit me each time I printed in the print shop, just to see what was going on, or to let me know it was time to eat, as was the case here, when she came to visit me whilst I printed the Copperman’s Day print for 2023:

More than once, she’d get into the ink on the press: sometimes subtly––like, we’d look at her and think, “She looks different today,” and then one of us would realize there was a faint streak of darkness on her orange fur, where, in hindsight, she had obviously passed a little too closely to the inked rollers (inked most likely with black) while I was not in attendance at the press. And then there was the time I was printing a project that required magenta ink, and I had cleaned everything just so at the end of the day and followed all post-press procedures to the T… except for one thing: I had failed to secure the lid firmly on the can of Van Son Rubber Base ink. It was during the overnight hours when Haden often did her explorations of the house, and that night, she managed to tip over the can of ink and the lid fell off and I awoke the next morning to a mostly magenta cat and to a trail of magenta kitty paw prints in every room of the house. This particular adventure required a trip to the emergency vet but all is well that ends well, right? Still to this day, ten years later, I find wisps of magenta on the maple doors of the kitchen cabinets, on the terra cotta tiles in the pantry, on the old oak floor boards in the living room. But now, every one of those magenta marks is a blessing I count, a reminder of our pal who has left a huge hole in our hearts with her absence.

As for Copperman’s Day: it is an old Dutch printer’s holiday, falling on the First Monday after Epiphany each January. It was traditional on this day for printers’ apprentices in the Netherlands to receive the day off to work on their own projects––usually small printed keepsakes that they’d sell for a copper.

And as for Seth and me: we do the best we can each day. Christmas was just not the same without Haden. I know she wouldn’t want it this way, but there was much less music in the house, and what little there was was very contemplative. Lots of piano (Jacqueline Schwab), lots of nuns (The Benedictines of Mary Queen of Apostles), and not a whole lot of Revels. We just didn’t have it in us. And just once: Holly Cole, Rebecca Jenkins, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Jane Siberry, and Victoria Williams, accompanied by Tim Ray on piano, singing “Count Your Blessings.”

N.B.: Clicking on each photo in this post makes the images larger (which is the case with all Convivio Book of Days chapters), so you may get a better view.

 

ONLINE SPECIALS: A COPPERMAN’S DAY SPECIAL, PLUS SHOP OUR VALENTINE SALE!
You’ll find this newest Copperman’s Day print and all our Copperman’s Day prints now at our our online catalog when you CLICK HERE. Order 5 or more of any of our mini prints (Copperman’s Day prints, B Mine Valentines, and our famous Keep Lake Worth Quirky prints) and use the code COPPERMAN when you check out; we’ll take $5 off your order to help balance out our flat rate domestic shipping charge of $9.50.

If you’re doing more serious shopping (and we do have lots to offer if you are), you may instead use discount code LOVEHANDMADE to save $10 on your $85 purchase, plus get free domestic shipping, too. That’s a total savings of $19.50. Spend less than $85 and our flat rate shipping fee of $9.50 applies. Newest arrivals: Letterpress printed Valentine cards in the Valentine section, and check our Specialty Foods section for some incredibly delicious chocolate we found from Iceland, including a particularly Icelandic blend of milk chocolate and licorice. If you love both these things, well… Icelanders long ago discovered that covering black licorice in milk chocolate, then dusting the result in licorice powder, is just amazing. (Trust me: we’re on our third bag so far.)  CLICK HERE to shop; you know we appreciate your support immensely. (We count you amongst our blessings, too.)

 

Feb 01 2024
4 Comments
Book of Days Calendar, Candlemas, Christmas, Imbolc, St. Brigid's Day

Oranges, or Your February Book of Days

Welcome to February. Here is your printable Convivio Book of Days calendar for the month, and we begin straightaway this February First with the celebration of Imbolc and St. Brigid’s Day, both of them signs of spring, for even in the dead of winter, we find ourselves here in the Northern Hemisphere just about forty days past the Midwinter solstice. It is a cross quarter day: in the wheel of the year, the cross quarter days mark the midpoints between solstices and equinoxes, and so yes: not only are we about forty days past the Midwinter solstice, but we are also forty days, more or less, away from the vernal equinox. Slowly, light has been increasing, and it will continue to do so all the way to the Midsummer solstice in June. It is the constant rearrange of this old earth, and Brigid is our bridge from winter to spring. She bids us welcome, though the steps be tentative, for the bridge may yet be icy and treacherous. So be it. We take that step, for there is no other choice. Our planet, on its course around the sun, dictates our path.

And tonight, St. Brigid’s Day becomes Candlemas Eve, and this is an important night if you have been following along on our Slow Christmas journey. If you have, you’d have used the Advent season to prepare for Christmas, and you would have certainly celebrated Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and the Twelve Days of Christmas and Epiphany. And if you, like us, still have the Christmas tree and garland in your home, tonight is the night it should be removed. You may do what you wish, of course, but Robert Herrick, our old reliable 17th century Book of Days poet, reminds us of the consequences of not removing these last vestiges of Christmas greenery tonight in his poem “Ceremony Upon Candlemas Eve”:

Down with the rosemary, and so
Down with the bays and misletoe ;
Down with the holly, ivy, all,
Wherewith ye dress’d the Christmas Hall :
That so the superstitious find
No one least branch there left behind :
For look, how many leaves there be
Neglected, there (maids, trust to me)
So many goblins you shall see.

I, for one, need no goblins running amuck in my home, so here, we pay heed to Mr. Herrick’s advice. Aside from the goblins, though, leaving Christmas greenery up beyond this date comes with the risk of setting us out of step with the tides of the year. You might replace the garland and the tree with new greenery, for this is the day to fashion a St. Brigid’s cross, which looks a bit like a four-spoked wheel, of rushes or reeds. All signs now point toward spring, toward increasing light, toward rebirth.

Even the Church acknowledges this: Candlemas on the Second of February (tomorrow) is the day that candles are blessed in the church, but it is also known as Purification Day, which harkens back to an old Hebrew tradition: forty days after the birth of a son, women would go to the temple to be purified. And there it is again: renewal. And so Mary did this, for it was her tradition, and when she did, it was there at the temple that she and her infant child ran into the elders Simeon and Anna, who recognized the child as “the Light of the World.” This is the basis for the blessing of candles on this day, and the day’s lovely name, which is even more beautiful in other languages: la Candelaria in Spanish, la Chandeleur in French. In France, the traditional evening meal for la Chandeleur is crêpes. In Mexico, la Candelaria is a night for tamales and hot chocolate, while the procession and celebration in Puno, Peru, is typically so big, it rivals that of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. And while the First of February is the night that all remaining Yuletide greenery is removed from the home, tradition would have us keep nativity scenes up through Candlemas, the Second of February. And at sunset on Candlemas, we’ll go through the house, through every room, lighting every lamp, even for just a few minutes. My favorite song for the day is an old carol called “Jesus, the Light of the World.” Is it a carol for Candlemas? Who knows. Certainly the words echo those of Simeon and Anna, the elders in the temple, so as for me, I say it is.

And so tonight we will thank our Christmas tree and garland for their presence with us all through Christmas, and then quietly carry them out the back door and into a quiet corner of the backyard, returning to nature what is hers. We’ll store these things there, and they will become part of the habitat that is our yard, a bit of fir and cedar amongst the bamboo and the palms and grasses… and then when December comes around again, on the longest night, we will use what is left of the tree as fuel for our Midwinter solstice fire as we welcome down the stars and welcome back the light. I love this bit of ceremony. For us, it connects one Christmas to the next, as it sends Father Christmas off each year with respect and dignity.

SHOP OUR VALENTINE SALE!
At our online catalog right now use discount code LOVEHANDMADE to save $10 on your $85 purchase, plus get free domestic shipping, too. That’s a total savings of $19.50. Spend less than $85 and our flat rate shipping fee of $9.50 applies. Newest arrivals: Letterpress printed Valentine cards in the Valentine section, and check our Specialty Foods section for some incredibly delicious chocolate we found from Iceland, including a particularly Icelandic blend of milk chocolate and licorice. If you love both these things, well… Icelanders long ago discovered that covering black licorice in milk chocolate, then dusting the result in licorice powder, is just amazing. (Trust me: we’ve gone through two bags so far.)  CLICK HERE to shop; you know we appreciate your support immensely.

 

Our cover star for this month’s Convivio Book of Days calendar is an 1889 painting that is officially untitled, but known also as “Oranges in Tissue with Vase.” It’s orange harvest season here in Florida. The painting, which is oil on canvas, is by Alberta Binford McCloskey, and comes to us via Wikimedia Commons.

 

← Older posts
Newer posts →