Category Archives: Christmas

Dec 27 2015
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Christmas

Blessed Wine

TastingTheWine

SECOND DAY of CHRISTMAS
St. John’s Day

The ceremony of this day focuses on wine. The early Church assigned the date of the birth of Christ to to the Midwinter solstice in December and the birth of St. John the Baptist to the Midsummer solstice in June. Here, on this Second Day of Christmas, we have the Feast Day of St. John the Evangelist, one of the twelve disciples. St. John is the only one of the disciples who did not die a martyr’s death for his faith. He lived to a ripe old age, but not without some attempts at his life. The most famous one involved poisoned wine. But John drank the wine and it had no ill effect on him, and from this comes the tradition of honoring his day with wine.

Wine has long been brought to churches on this day for a blessing, especially in Germany and in Austria, and this blessed St. John’s wine is thought to have healing properties and to taste better than other wines. Some even hold that wine that is not blessed but is stored nearby to blessed St. John’s wine improves in flavor just by being near it.

Yesterday, for the First Day of Christmas and St. Stephen’s Day, we enjoyed roasted chestnuts and mulled wine. Today, we do the same. Simple foods and a simple act mark the day best.

Image: “Provando o Vinho” (“Tasting the Wine”) by an unknown artist working in the English School, Portugal. Oil painting, 19th century. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Tagged
Dec 26 2015
2 Comments
Christmas

First of Twelve Days

ChestnutDad

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

It’s not uncommon for folks to feel let down once Christmas Day has passed, or sad that it’s over. We lay our hopes and dreams upon Christmas, along with expectations for how we envision the holiday, but Christmas delivers to us what it will. Perfection is rarely part of the equation. And here we have the antidote to all of these feelings: Welcome now to the Twelve Days of Christmas. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day stand on their own and we enter now the season of Christmas proper. Following along means taking a step outside dominant culture, but if you can handle that, you will find this journey more fulfilling than the alternative, trust me. For doing so means treating Christmas like an old friend who comes to visit each year, and it is good to be friendly with Christmas. This is what “keeping Christmas” is all about.

This First Day of Christmas 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, this is a day for roasted chestnuts and mulled wine (as is tomorrow, St. John’s Day: the Second Day of Christmas). In medieval Europe, chestnuts were so common a part of our foodways that much of the chestnut crop was ground into flour for bread and other baked goods. This changed over the centuries, of course, to the point that chestnuts are more of an oddity and delicacy on our tables. They are, nonetheless, a big part of my family’s dinner table come autumn and winter each year, and now here we have two days set aside where they play a central role.

My Aunt Anne and my mom say that my grandmother, Assunta, typically made soup for supper on this First Day of Christmas, where 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.

And in England and the Commonwealth countries, it is Boxing Day. 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. Certainly those boxes contained chestnuts.

Tonight, join us in raising a glass of mulled wine and cracking open some roasted chestnuts for this First Day of Christmas. The mad rush is over, and now we can enjoy Christmas in our own time.

Image: My father cutting a cross into each chestnut, preparing them for roasting. The cross cut into the nut makes things a lot easier when it comes to peeling them when they are hot out of the oven. Dad doesn’t have many kitchen tasks, but it is always his job to do this.

 

Tagged
Dec 25 2015
6 Comments
Christmas, Yule

The Close & Holy Darkness

Quiet

And once again, it is Christmas. It is the Quiet Time of Christmas as I write this, the small hours past midnight on Christmas Eve, after the last minute rush of the day, after the realization that all will not be done (and the peace that comes along with accepting that), after the unplanned but necessary changing of a kitchen faucet for an old family friend, after the Christmas Eve dinner with family. It was the traditional Italian dinner for this night: seven fishes. Well, six fishes actually… but the bacala made an appearance in two separate dishes, so I think that counts for seven. So many fishes, but this is the tradition, and we do what our parents and grandparents did for this night, for it is what their parents and grandparents did, and so it goes, down the line. Such is the stuff of memory and tradition.

This quiet time is certainly one of the best things about Christmas in my book. The darkness is close and holy, just as Dylan Thomas described it. The lights from the Christmas tree illuminate the room and the lights from the rooftop, this year all blue and green, cast a glow into the windows. I think of all the stories of Christmas and all the magic that happens in them on this enchanted night: the gift bearers, the ghosts of Christmases past, present, and yet to come, angels like Clarence and Dudley from old black and white films, and of course the child born in a barn and laid in straw, kept warm by the breath of an ox and an ass.

Christmas is just beginning. Tomorrow, we awake to Christmas Day, more joyful celebration, to be followed then by the Twelve Days of Christmas, a traditional period of time that stands outside ordinary time, six days in the old year, six in the new. I’ll write about each day for you as it comes, beginning with St. Stephen’s Day on the 26th. The chapters come daily, my gift this yuletide to you. I hope you’ll enjoy them and share them with others. Perhaps the oddest thing about Christmas to me is that corporate America jumps on the Christmas bandwagon sometimes as early as summertime, plying their seasonal wares to us. Christmas music in the stores sometimes in October, products on the shelves come August. They whip us into a Christmas frenzy for months, and yet once Christmas actually begins, they pull the plug on it and we, in turn, are sick of it all. It’s over saturation. This is the real war on Christmas, and a great disrespect to it.

As for the folks in this house, we find the slow approach best, and we find that celebrating this season to its fullest for its full duration of twelve days is best. It keeps us at peace with the season, helps us keep it and keep it well, keeps us passionately in love with it as the years go by. And this we wish to you, as well. Merry Christmas.

Image: The view from where I am sitting this late Christmas Eve hour.

 

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