Category Archives: Christmas

Dec 30 2015
Christmas

A Cause for Caroling

Sentimental

FIFTH DAY of CHRISTMAS
Bring in the Boar

Soon after I first started making letterpress printed limited edition books in 1994, I named my press Red Wagon Press, and that was good, but it turned out there were other Red Wagon Presses out there, so by the early oughts Seth and I were on the lookout for a new press name. We tried a few on for size, but ultimately it was Convivio Bookworks that won out. We began using that name in 2003, and it seemed a good fit, for the name suggested celebration and festivity and an honoring of heritage: all things that we have come to love and try to honor in our little Lake Worth home.

The Convivio name comes directly from an ancient Christmas Carol, 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 which did the beast in. He 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.

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 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 as elaborate as a boar’s head. Whatever it is, do it with fanfare and celebration and you will be honoring the spirit of this Fifth Day of Christmas.

Here’s something else you might enjoy: One of our readers, Melissa Wibom in Sunnyvale, California, sent me a link to a BBC Radio 4 program about Christmas carols. She had sent a link to one part of the series, one that mentioned our Boar’s Head Carol. Seth and I listened just yesterday… and in the process got hooked, enough that we wanted to listen to the entire ten part series. Each part is only about ten minutes long. It’s extremely entertaining and informative. 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. 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. It’s called A Cause for Caroling. The first part is at the bottom of the webpage, so start there. 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 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!

 

Dec 29 2015
Christmas

What Fools these Mortals Be

Chaplin

FOURTH DAY of CHRISTMAS
The Feast of Fools

Numbers and balance play fascinating parts in the seasonal round of the year and in the varying traditions, both Pagan and Christian. Here, at the Fourth Day of Christmas, we reach a Christmas tradition whose roots go back further than the birth of Christ: It is the Feast of Fools, a direct descendent of the Roman Saturnalia that has given us so many of our Christmas traditions. The idea is simple: today, all order is turned upside down. Chaos ensues. This disintegration of order parallels the disintegration of the old year.

Back to the numbers: Twelve. Six of our twelve days of Christmas are in the old year, and six are in the new. For the first half of the Twelve Days, the old year is dying, disintegrating into chaos. It is the theme from time immemorial for this solstice tide: the old year must die for the new year to be born, the sun must die at the solstice to rise again, the son born at Christmas must die to rise again at Easter. The story is an ancient one, told over and over again. And come the new year, we welcome the other half of our Twelve Days. And there it is: balance and harmony, as the old year gives way to the new.

And so here today comes the Feast of Fools, a day not widely observed nowadays, but perhaps it should be. One of the grand things about the Feast of Fools is it gives us a chance to make tense situations more palatable through humor. For today, the children take charge of the house, the servants lord over the masters, the jester rules the court. Certainly there are simple things we can do: have breakfast for dinner (why not?). Take the cat for a walk. Let your guard down and be a little foolish. You will be in good company in a long line of wise yet silly people… like Charlie Chaplin, for instance. Here then, is a health to the comedians, who make us laugh at the silliness of our ways (even when we think we are being serious).

 

Image: Charlie Chaplin and his cat at their home in Switzerland, circa 1950s.

 

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Dec 28 2015
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Christmas, St. Nicholas

Unless Ye Become as Little Children

Kids

THIRD DAY of CHRISTMAS
Holy Innocents Day, Childremas

“Christmas is for children” is something we hear at times, often from older folks who have fallen out of touch with their own sense of wonder. It is a statement with which I heartily disagree. Christmas is for everyone. Nonetheless, here we have a day that has always been devoted to children. It is the Third Day of Christmas, Childremas, or Holy Innocents Day. The Christmas story begins with peace and wonder but quickly turns, for the world has always been threatened by the insecurities of weak people in positions of power. The news of the birth of a king did not sit well with King Herod of Judea, and he ordered the slaughter of all the children of the land. This day honors those children and all children.

In last year’s chapter of the Convivio Book of Days for Childremas, we mentioned the tradition of the Boy Bishop. One of our readers, Kathy Whalen in England, wrote that Manchester Cathedral had recently elected a girl bishop for the first time, the first in the United Kingdom. Well done, we thought! Here’s the tradition, one that goes back to medieval times throughout Europe: a Boy Bishop would be elected at cathedrals each year on St. Nicholas’ Day, the Sixth of December. He was typically chosen from the boys in the choir and for the duration of his reign, which typically ended on Childremas, he wore bishop’s vestments and performed all the duties of a bishop, save for celebrating Mass. In some places, the actual bishop would be obliged to follow the orders of the Boy Bishop, which calls to mind the Feast of Fools, which will be celebrated tomorrow on the Fourth Day of Christmas, when the normal order of things is ceremoniously turned on its head. This melding of Childremas and the Feast of Fools probably is informed by the words of the Magnificat: God has put down the mighty from their throne and has exalted the humble and the meek. On the Third Day of Christmas, typically, the Boy Bishop would be allowed to return to being a child once again (though we noticed the Girl Bishop at Manchester Cathedral last year had to be a bishop all the way to Epiphany!).

One of the oldest traditions for Childremas is the ceremonial exchange of token blows using evergreen branches of birch or pine or rosemary or bay: parents beat their children, children beat their parents, husbands and wives beat each other, and masters and servants exchanged blows, too. The beatings were in good fun and were not at all done with malice or cruelty. Along with the beatings came the words, “Fresh, green, fair and fine! Gingerbread and brandy-wine!” or else, “Fresh green! Long life! Give me a coin!”

Finally, in Spain and Latin America, the Third Day of Christmas is a day for practical jokes, kind of like April Fools Day. The victims of these jokes are known as 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… and perhaps reconnecting with the child you once were, revisiting the land we all came from. And why not? Tomorrow is the Feast of Fools. Here’s your chance to practice for that.

 

Image: Seth and I were married, after twenty years together, this past October 26. All our nieces and nephews and great nieces and great nephews played their parts, some carrying flowers, some carrying pumpkins. They are the kids in our lives, and here they all are in this photograph by Charles Pratt.

 

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