Category Archives: Epiphany

Jan 04 2015
Christmas, Epiphany, La Befana, The Gift Bearers, Twelfth Night

Following that Star

Cappella_dei_magi_paesaggio

TENTH DAY of CHRISTMAS:
St. Titus’s and St. Gregory’s Day

Again today, like yesterday, there are no particular customs associated with this, the Tenth Day of Christmas. It is the Feast Day of St. Titus and St. Gregory. Titus was a disciple of St. Paul in the first century, and St. Gregory was a bishop in the sixth century. It’s also St. Rigobert’s Day and St. Ramon’s Day. But not much is done to celebrate these good guys, and in this house, the Tenth Day of Christmas is typically a day of preparation for the bigger festivities that come next over the two days that follow: Twelfth Night and Epiphany, the celebrations that close the Christmas season.

The celebration of Epiphany on January 6 rivals that of Christmas Day in some countries. It’s the big day for gift giving, and we see the last of the wintertime gift bearers in Italy with la befana and throughout Spain and Latin America, the three kings themselves bringing presents. As for Twelfth Night, well, this is a celebration that has fallen a bit out of favor here in the States, and this is too bad. We think of Twelfth Night and Epiphany as a proper close to the Christmas season. For those of you who feel a bit let down after Christmas, these are especially important celebrations, for they help give Christmas its full life and scope.

Last year I shared with you a recipe for one of the Epiphany traditions in our house: Three Kings Cakes. I’ll share it with you again today, for if you bake them today or tomorrow morning, they’ll be ready in plenty of time for Twelfth Night or for Epiphany. You will need three loaf pans because the recipe yields three cakes, one for each of the Magi: Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. The Magi will arrive on the Sixth of January, just in time for these delightful cakes that are flavored with honey and rose water, flavors of the ancient Mediterranean world, flavors they certainly knew well in their day.

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THREE KINGS CAKES
makes three cakes

For the Batter
1 cup butter
generous 3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 1/2 cups currants
3 cups applesauce
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
4 cups flour

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Cream together the butter and the sugar, then add the eggs and vanilla. Beat smooth before adding the remaining ingredients. Grease 3 loaf pans (about 8″ x 4″ x 3″ or so) and divide the batter amongst the pans. Bake for one hour, or until a toothpick poked into the center of each cake comes out dry. Let the cakes cool in their pans on a rack.

For the Syrup
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1 cinnamon stick
6 whole cloves
2 tablespoons rose water

Once the cakes are baked, combine the syrup ingredients, except for the rose water, in a saucepan over medium heat. Once the sugar dissolves, add the rose water. Remove the cinnamon stick and the cloves and then pour the hot syrup over the cakes in their pans, divided equally amongst the three cakes. The syrup will soak into the cakes. Allow to cool completely before unmolding from the pans. Serving the three cakes on three platters makes for a nice presentation on Epiphany Day or on Twelfth Night.

If you have trouble finding good rose water, we happen to sell an excellent one at our website, in the Inspired Living for Everyday pages of our online catalog. Our rose water is made by the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community in Maine, from their line of culinary herbs and herbal teas that we’ve been selling at conviviobookworks.com for years now. It’s one of the most delightful flavorings you’ll bake with, adding a mysterious and delicate flavor not just to these cakes, but also to apple pie, cookies, and even French toast. It’s pretty wonderful stuff.

Christmas, meanwhile, is soon coming to a close. Somewhere on the horizon there are three old men following that star, nearing their destination, and in Italy, la befana is at her cleaning; she has her broom in hand, and she’s preparing to sweep away the festivities.

 

Image: Detail from a fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Cappella dei Magi (Chapel of the Magi) at the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence, Italy, 15th century. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

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Jan 12 2014
3 Comments
Christmas, Copperman's Day, Epiphany, Plough Monday, St. Distaff's Day

Plough Monday & Copperman’s Day

Copperman

Come tomorrow, the first Monday after Epiphany, we get another of the old agricultural post Christmas “get back to work” celebrations from England. This time, it’s the guys who are back to work with a ceremonial ploughing of the frozen ground on Plough Monday.

Truth be told, Plough Monday is not very much about work at all. It does, however, mark the day the lads return to ordinary time now that Christmas is passed, much like St. Distaff’s Day did for the lasses last week on January 7, the day after Epiphany. It is an old holiday rooted in the centuries that fell out of favor for some time but is seeing a bit of a revival again. You can be sure there was ale involved back in the old days. It was, as well, another big day for mummers and guisers performing street plays. It was perhaps their last hurrah for the winter, and the typical Plough Monday mummers play had the ever present theme of life and death and rebirth––cycles that are very present and familiar to those who are close to the land.

Mummers or not, the day did typically see the local men dressed so as to evoke the fool. The sillier the better and all topsy-turvy, with shirts on top of coats and all bedecked with ribbons, too… a remnant of that Feast of Fools atmosphere that permeates much of the Twelve Days of Christmas. One of the men would dress as an old woman: the Bessy, who perhaps again personifies the old hag of winter, the goddess in her wise crone stage. The men and Bessy would parade through the village with a finely decorated plough, raising a general ruckus of song and cheers and dances (some truly ancient and mysterious ones, like the Sword Dance) and the blowing of horns and the banging of drums, and always in procession, too, the collection box, into which folks were expected to drop a few coins for the Plough Monday merriment. Those who didn’t might have their front yards subjected to the plough. But this mischief was rare; most everyone gave a little something to the sport, and the celebration was, for the most part, a benign and happy one as it progressed through town.

The first Monday after Epiphany marks the date of another obscure holiday, this one from Holland: Copperman’s Day. Convivio Bookworks is, at heart, a print shop, so Copperman’s Day is rather close to our hearts, for it is a printer’s holiday. It was a day when printers’ apprentices got the day off to work on their own projects and to show off the printing skills they had learnt to date in the course of their apprenticeships. They would sell these printed works in exchange for a copper, hence the name, Copperman’s Day. It’s a Dutch tradition that seems fit for revival what with the current renewal of interest in letterpress (and the handmade in general), and perhaps we’re doing our part by beginning an annual Convivio Bookworks Copperman’s Day keepsake. Our inaugural Copperman’s Day print will, if all goes as planned, be available by nightfall on the holiday, or soon after. Here’s to new traditions!

 

Jan 07 2014
Christmas, Epiphany, St. Distaff's Day

St. Distaff’s Day

Distaff

Christmas is over and it’s back to work. St. Distaff’s Day falls each January 7, the day following Epiphany, to remind us of the shift back to ordinary time. The return to work comes not without a little celebrating, though. Our oft quoted Book of Days poet Robert Herrick wrote the poem that best explains the holiday. It’s a poem from his 1648 book Hesperides, called “Saint Distaff’s Day, or the morrow after Twelfth Day.”

Partly worke and partly play
Ye must on St. Distaff’s Day:
From the Plough soone free your team;
Then come home and fother them.
If the Maides a-spinning goe,
Burne the flax, and fire the tow:
Scorch their plackets, but beware
That ye singe no maiden-haire.
Let the maides bewash the men.
Give St. Distaff all the right,
Then bid Christmas sport good night;
And next morrow, every one
To his owne vocation.

In truth, St. Distaff’s Day marked the day when women traditionally got back to work, especially at their spinning. The men still have a few days to go (quite a few this year, as Plough Monday, their traditional return-to-work day, is near a week away).

Perhaps the oddest thing about St. Distaff’s Day is the fact that there is no St. Distaff. The distaff is not a person at all but a tool that is part of the process of spinning wool or flax into thread, which is the first step to making cloth. The distaff and spindle were the tools that preceded the spinning wheel. Spinning was so associated with women’s work that the word spinster, which is happily not much used these days, once was a recognized legal term in England to describe an unmarried woman, and the terms spear side and distaff side were also legal terms to distinguish the inheritance of male from female children. Any woman who spun thread (and that would have been most women in earlier times) would know the distaff well.

St. Distaff’s Day was a day for mischief: yes, the women were trying to get back to their spinning, but the men, meanwhile, were there attempting to set fire to their flax. Of course, in the women’s attempts to put out the fires, many a bucket of water was tossed upon the mischievous men on St. Distaff’s Day.

Nowadays, perhaps it’s best to mark the day as one in which we acknowledge the shift from Christmas, a period outside of time, to the regular workaday world: ordinary time… but doing so with some measure of ceremony. Partly work and partly play and why not? Get back to work, but have a little fun, too.

 

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