Category Archives: Christmas

Dec 27 2014
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Christmas

Bless Your Wine

Le marchand de vin et son épouse

SECOND DAY of CHRISTMAS:
St. John’s Day

The Second Day of Christmas is given to St. John the Evangelist. He was one of the disciples of Jesus and the only one who lived to a ripe old age. The rest were all martyred for their faith. John certainly had a few close calls. The most famous attempt on his life involved poisoned wine, but he drank the wine and it had no effect on him. For this reason, wine is central to the Second Day of Christmas, and bottles of wine are typically blessed in churches on this day, a tradition especially in Europe. This blessed wine is reserved through the year and given as a healing tonic to those who are ill. But the blessed St. John’s wine is also thought to have a better flavor and to even impart better flavor in wine that is stored in its vicinity.

Last night, for St. Stephen’s Day, Italians drank mulled wine and ate roasted chestnuts, and this continues tonight for St. John. I was not fond of chestnuts when I was a boy, but now I love them and I imagine them to be amongst the foods of the gods. They are part of the warmth of home and hearty earthiness that I think of when I think of dark winter. And any night that calls for mulled wine is okay by me, too.

Mulled wine is easy enough to make. Here’s our recipe: Pour a bottle of good red wine into a stainless steel pot and set it on the stove over medium heat. Add some mulling spices (we sell some wonderful mulling spices at the Convivio Bookworks website that are from the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community in Maine… they call it Mulled Cider Mix but it’s just as good in wine), and sugar. Start with a teaspoon or two and add more to taste. Sometimes mulled wine is too sweet for my taste… and while you can always add more sugar, you can’t take it away once it’s in. So I add the sugar gradually, always tasting as I go. Heat to allow the spicy flavors to infuse the wine. Strain before pouring into cups.

Gather good company if you can for a traditional toast to good health and a good Christmastide. Should the company be small that’s okay. Just one or two of you is still good reason to raise a toast to good health and a good Christmastide and to ask for the blessing of St. John upon your wine throughout the year.

Image: Le Marchand de Vin et Son Épouse by Pompeo Massani. Oil on canvas, c.1900. [Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.]

 

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Dec 26 2014
Christmas

St. Stephen’s Day

Frühstück mit Trauben, Nüssen, Kastanien und Brot

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

Christmas Eve ushers in Christmas Day, and now Christmas Day is past and we enter into the Twelve Days of Christmas, days that stand outside of ordinary time. This is Christmastide, or Yuletide, and there is a delightful dance between the newer Christian religion and the older Pagan one that make up the ceremonies of this period. The Twelve Days of Christmas will take us to the Feast of the Epiphany on the sixth day of January, though you will meet people who consider the Christmas season to run through to February 2, the next cross quarter day, which is halfway between the Winter Solstice, which has just passed, and the Spring Equinox. We mark the Second of February here in the States as Groundhog Day, but it is known also by its traditional name as Candlemas or by its even more traditional name: Imbolc.

But I’m getting far ahead of myself. The point is Christmas has just begun. Christmas exists on its own as Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and today, December 26, is counted as the First Day of Christmas. On this day we celebrate St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr. Being the first to die for his faith (about 34 AD), the Church gave Stephen the first saint’s day after Christmas Day. There is a second St. Stephen who came many years later. This St. Stephen is associated with animals, and particularly horses, and so the First Day of Christmas is a good day to honor animals.

In earlier times St. Stephen’s Day was celebrated by hunting a wren and parading the wren’s corpse through the village. There are some places where this still takes place, especially in Ireland, but it is most often a fake wren that is paraded through town now. Traditionally, though, the day does not go well for wrens. The story goes that it was a wren who betrayed St. Stephen: Stephen had been captured and was about to make his escape when a wren began squawking, awakening the guards who were supposed to be watching him. Wrens have since been considered very unlucky… hence the Day of the Wren. Today’s village parades in Ireland and elsewhere will be attended by wrenboys in bright costumes and strange conical straw hats.

And finally it is Boxing Day today, as well, a British tradition in which gift boxes are given to servants and workers by their employers. Most servants had to work on Christmas Day to help make the day as merry as could be for the families that employed them. But the day after Christmas was usually their day off to spend with their own families. Their employers would send them off with a box containing gifts for themselves and the families they’d go home to.

In Italy, St. Stephen’s Day and the day that follows, St. John’s Day, calls for mulled wine and roasted chestnuts. This is the tradition we like best for this First Day of Christmas.

Image: Frühstück mit Trauben, Nüssen, Kastanien und Brot by Georg Flegel. Oil on oak panel, c.1638. [Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.]  The chestnuts are the “kastanien;” “castagne” in Italian.

 

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Dec 24 2014
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Christmas

Now It Is Christmas Again

Glade Jul

And now it is Christmas again. There is an old Swedish Christmas carol, “Nu är Det Jul Igen,” that says just this, and you can count on Swedes around the globe to be singing this very carol this very night. It is usually sung while dancing around the Christmas tree. The song, the dance, the tree aglow in the night… all of these things point toward the fact that this night is not like other nights: This is a night charged with magic. This is something we know deep in our bones. We know it from the time we are little children and we know it when we are old. Christmas Eve offers us a free ride back to that childhood, just a brief visit. We either hop aboard or we do not, but the offer is there.

Christmas has a lot of pressure put upon it. As magical nights go, this is the one most of us connect to. But it’s hard work connecting with that portal. We know the stories that have been passed down through the centuries––that the water in wells turns to wine at midnight on Christmas Eve and that magic lights twinkle at the deepest depths of those wells, that even rivers run with wine at the midnight hour, and that animals are given the power of speech and that they kneel in their barns in the cold night air, in reverence to the divine child that enters our common world. Those who set out to prove the magic are usually punished for doing so and so we do well to leave well enough alone. If the animals are kneeling and speaking, so be it. There is magic more readily available and apparent in the tree, in the lights, in the incense and candles, the cookies and songs we taste and sing just at this time of year.

But we try so hard to make Christmas perfect that sometimes it exhausts us. I think this is because we are so disconnected from the magic, the ceremony, of the everyday. We try to do it all now, in this one magical night, because it is the granddaddy of them all. But one of the most magical things about Christmas is that it comes whether we are ready for it or not. There is another old text, that of a Christmas play from Cornwall that is performed by morris dancers now all over the world. Father Christmas is one of the main players, and he enters, always, with the same words: Here comes I, Old Father Christmas; Welcome or welcome not.

Apparently, even in ancient times in Cornwall, Christmas would come upon us too quickly. A good thing to keep in mind today. The presents may not be all wrapped and the decorations may not be all up and the cards may not be all written and sent… but Christmas comes in its own time, and the magic is that we are swept along into it, and we are powerless in its wake. We are taken up in its quiet procession, and we either fight it or go along with it. If we go along with it, we let go of all that is not perfect and accept it for what it is: A quiet night, full of magic real or imagined. And what is the difference? What does it matter? “Now it is Christmas again.” Certainly there will be some quiet time for you tonight, time when you will sit and realize that all you did not get to do is not done but it’s okay, still it is Christmas. Its time is just beginning. Allow yourself to be immersed in it. Enjoy the magic.

 

Image: Glade Jul by Viggo Johansen. Oil on canvas, 1891. [Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.] Johansen was a painter from Denmark, not far from Sweden, and certainly he knew a bit about “Nu är Det Jul Igen.”

 

 

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