Category Archives: Christmas

Jan 01 2016
2 Comments
Christmas, New Year

Wassail, Wassail

Heinrich_Brandes_-_Eine_Bowle_eine_Ananas_und_ein_Teppich_auf_einem_Tisch

SEVENTH DAY of CHRISTMAS
New Year’s Day

The toast “Wassail!” is a hearty one. Go on, say it. It sounds a lot more magical than the toasts we tend to use nowadays upon lifting a glass in good company. “Cheers!” just doesn’t have the same potency as “Wassail!” Indeed, wassail is derived from the Old English Wes Hel: Be of good health. It is both a toast and a drink, and on this first day of the year, this seventh day of Christmas, wassailing is customary. We wassail each other, we wassail the trees from whence comes our wine, our cider, our ale. All of it––the transformation of seed to tree, of juice to libation––a bit of magic in the form of everyday alchemy.

There are many kinds of wassail made from all sorts of ingredients, but here’s the recipe we share with you each year for a good wassail: Pour the contents of two large bottles of beer or ale (about 4 pints) into a pot and place it on the stove to heat slowly. Add about a half cup sugar and a healthy dose of mulling spices. (If you don’t have mulling spices on hand, you can use cinnamon sticks and whole cloves… though the mulling spices lend a more interesting flavor.) Add a half pint each of orange juice and pineapple juice, as well as the juice of a large lemon. Peel and slice two apples and place the apple slices into the pot, too. Heat the brew but don’t let it boil, then pour the heated wassail into a punch bowl to serve.

Punches of this nature were more popular in times past, but I think it’s high time for a revival. I love the ceremony of a punch, from the concocting to the ladeling of the steaming drink from a punch bowl into cups. The true custom for the day would have us gather around an apple tree at noon with our wassail punch and drink a hearty wassail to each other and to the tree. Usually it’s the oldest apple tree in the orchard. We don’t have apple trees here in Lake Worth, so here we know all about improvising; feel free to improvise yourself. It’s the spirit of wassailing that is most important and not so much the small details. It’s quite all right if you can’t get out there at noon, too. Here’s an old song to sing or shout out as you wassail the trees:

Here’s to thee, old apple tree
Whence thou may’st bud and
whence thou may’st blow,
And whence thou may’st
bear apples enow.

Hats full, Caps full, Bushel,
bushel sacks full,
And my pockets full, too!
Huzzah!

The wish is for abundance. And so on this first day of the new year, we wish you all abundance and good health, too. Wes Hel! Wassail! And Huzzah as well!

 

Image: “Eine Bowle, eine Ananas und ein Teppich auf einem Tisch” ( a bowl of punch, with a pineapple and a carpet on a table) by Georg Heinrich Brandes. Oil on canvas, c. 1800s. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Tagged
Dec 31 2015
3 Comments
Christmas, New Year

Endings, Beginnings

Father_Time

SIXTH DAY of CHRISTMAS
New Year’s Eve, Hogmanay, First Footing

The old year now away is fled, the new year it is entered. In our journey through the Twelve Days of Christmas we come now to the last of those in the old year. The balance will be in the new, and in this way, Christmastide bridges past and future: Twelve days outside ordinary time with one foot in the year that’s dying and one foot in the year that’s being born. We come now to January, the month the Romans named for Janus, the god with two faces who looks both back on the past and forward to the future.

And while there is much to tell about the traditions of New Year’s Eve, I don’t think I can write about them any better this year than I did last year. The hour is late and a wiser man probably would have these things written for you well in advance… but I have never been known for my wisdom, and while I should have been writing, I’m afraid Seth and I have been baking lace cookies and drinking a bottle of home brewed Convivio Stout. The stout was good, the lace cookies sublime, and here is last year’s chapter for you to get reacquainted with. And I’m serious about the invitation at the end. Here we go:

The New Year’s Eves I remember as a child were for the most part already emptied of the traditions of the Old World. New Year’s Eve usually was celebrated with all the aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents at either our house or at Aunt Mary and Uncle Phil’s house, and there would usually be a very large Italian hero, perhaps six feet long, and there were potato chips and Guy Lombardo and his orchestra would be on TV playing “Auld Lange Syne” at precisely the right moment. Guy Lombardo gave way eventually to Dick Clark and Dick Clark eventually to who knows who now. Gathering around the TV is, I’m certain, my least favorite part of New Year’s Eve, but it has always been thus in my family, and so when we gather, this is what we do.

In earlier days, Dad says, Grandma Cutrone would come round through the crowd and make sure everyone ate a spoonful of lentils and a dozen grapes at midnight on New Year’s Eve, and this, to me, is more like it. Who needs to watch a glittery dropping ball on TV when you have more interesting customs like a spoonful of lentils and a handful of grapes? The lentils are an old Italian ritual. Each little lentil symbolizes a coin, so the idea is eat lots of lentils, gather lots of riches in the new year. Capo d’anno, as the Italians call New Year’s, is all about good fortune ahead and also about clearing out the dross: All over Italy, old unwanted things are tossed out of windows at the stroke of midnight. It is not a night for midnight strolls, for all manner of items are tossed out of windows, even really big things like appliances. To have an old dishwasher fall toward you from a second floor window is something you’ll want to avoid. Best to stay indoors with the revelers in this case.

Grandma Cutrone is long gone and so are the lentils for New Year’s Eve in my family, but on my mother’s side, there the tradition was for homemade zeppole: fried dough, essentially, but the dough is enriched with eggs and this is the only night each year that we do this. The zeppole are dusted in confectioners’ sugar or drizzled with honey for a sweet year ahead. So tonight there will for sure be zeppole. And still at midnight for each person a dozen grapes, one for each month of the year, and a glass of champagne to toast the new year properly.

Scotland is perhaps the place where the new year rings in the loudest, for New Year’s is the height of the Christmas season there, bigger perhaps than even Christmas itself. The celebration there is known as Hogmanay, which is believed to to be derived from the French au gui menez, “lead to the mistletoe,” and this suggests a very ancient and pre-Christian derivation of most Hogmanay traditions, for it leads directly back to the Celtic druids and the mistletoe that was sacred to their ceremonies. First Footing is an aspect of Hogmanay that feels particularly like a magic spell: The first person to step across the threshold of the front doorway after midnight is this First Footer, and it is hoped that this person would be a red- or dark-haired man carrying whisky or mistletoe or, in some cases, bread, salt and coal. In this case he would kiss all the women and shake the hands of all the men before placing the coal on the fire and the bread and salt on the table and then he’d kiss all the women and shake hands with all the men once more on his way out. A ritual like this goes not without a bit of preplanning, but, as with most rituals, it’s got to be done right if the magic is to work. The goal here is prosperity and good luck, much like the lentils and grapes of Italy… but the lentils and grapes seem less complicated!

Traditions for this night vary across the globe, and we’d love to hear about yours, so please do share them. And may peace, prosperity and good luck be yours and ours in the new year. Good things to us all: good health, good spirit, creativity and wealth. Happy New Year.

 

Image: Father Time and Baby New Year from Frolic & Fun, 1897. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Tagged ,
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!

 

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