Category Archives: Christmas

Dec 26 2015
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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.

 

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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.

 

Dec 21 2015
8 Comments
Advent, Christmas, Solstice, Yule

Receiving Radiance

solstice

Since the midsummer solstice in June, we have been gradually losing daylight here in the planet’s Northern Hemisphere. Just a bit each day. By the autumnal equinox in September, day and night were equal. And now, here at the midwinter solstice, we reach the end of that cycle: It is the longest night of the year. Tomorrow, the pendulum begins its shift to the opposite and light will once again begin to increase. It is the clockwork of our planet, the constant rearrange, each day slightly different from the one before it and the one that follows.

For those of us who keep the traditional ways, the revels of midwinter are just now getting underway. We’ve been preparing all these weeks––last night, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, we lit the fourth candle in the advent wreath, completing the circle: four purple candles and one rose. The daily advent candle is burning down, too: just four nights from now, the candle will be gone. Our time of preparation is coming to a close and the real festivity is about to begin with Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and the Twelve Days of Christmas that follow: six of which are in the old year, six in the new––twelve days that stand outside of ordinary time.

But that is still ahead of us. For tonight, we celebrate the planet’s reaching its wintertime zenith in its constant shift, like an old man in his rocking chair on the porch. On this longest night of the year, Seth and I will head out into that midwinter darkness, and in the copper fire bowl in the back yard we will light a fire made from the wood of last year’s Christmas tree, which has been resting quietly in a corner of the yard all year long. It is our own little tradition but one that we feel honors best the spirit of the tree that brought us so much joy last yuletide. This year, the actual moment of solstice––of sun standing still (from the Latin sol stetit, “sun stands still”) is 11:49 PM here in Lake Worth, which is Eastern Daylight Time. You can count on us being out there at our fire at that moment (and for a good while before and after, as well), probably with a bottle of St. Bernardus Christmas Ale.

Will you join us in spirit? We’ve been talking about our solstice tradition for years now, so maybe there are some among you who also save last year’s tree for this night. Or maybe this is your year to begin doing so. Or maybe the best you can do is to light a candle with us tonight at 11:49. Wherever you are and however you join in, we are here as light bearers ourselves, receiving radiance from others: from sun, from flame, from the kindness we send out into the world reflected upon us. We bid you peace. Welcome yule.

Here’s a yuletide gift for you, from us: it is Björk’s song Solstice. You will most likely have to endure a brief advertisement before the video, but once that part is done, I’d suggest viewing it full screen and turning up the volume a bit. It is a simple and beautiful song, just Björk’s odd and powerful voice accompanied by the gravity harp, a musical instrument created especially for the songs on her 2011 record Biophilia. This song and its accompanying video remind me of the great immensity of things, of things much larger than my self and my concerns. Sometimes seeing the bigger picture is very comforting.

 

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