Category Archives: Midsummer

Jun 20 2017
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Midsummer, Solstice

Solstice

In the Northern Hemisphere, just past midnight tonight, arrives the summer solstice. The precise moment is 12:24 AM here in the Eastern Daylight Time Zone, but if you’ve been reading the Convivio Book of Days for any length of time, I think you know how I feel about precision. I am more of a roundabout kind of guy. Be that as it may, come 12:24 AM here in Lake Worth, it will, officially by the almanac, be summer.

Though I may not care much for precise moments in time, still it is important to have precision in our lives, and so here comes yet another apology from your humble Book of Days author, for I have been leading you astray for years now in yet another matter, a scientific one. This time it turns out I’ve been absolutely wrong about the celestial mechanics of our great planet. I have always pictured the planet rocking back and forth as it orbits the sun, like a great pendulum, thereby creating our seasons. I was so wrong. Here’s what I’ve learnt, only since the last solstice in December: our great planet remains fixed as it spins, always tilted at 23.5 degrees, and it is this constant tilt of the planet that creates the seasons. We travel around the sun; a journey that lasts for one year. For half the year the Northern Hemisphere receives more sunlight thanks to this tilt. And for the other half of the year, the Southern Hemisphere receives more sunlight. So, thanks to this 23.5 degree tilt, we in the Northern Hemisphere receive more sunlight from the vernal equinox in March through the autumnal equinox in September.

It’s all about geometry, which is probably why it’s taken me so many years to grasp this basic understanding. I checked out from math somewhere along the time that geometry was introduced to my studies. My loss, I know, but apparently yours, too, if you’ve been reading all these years and believing what I’ve been telling you.

But now that we are all in the know and have a different (ahem, accurate) depiction of our planet’s celestial mechanics, let us focus on the social customs of the summer solstice, this longest day. The solstice marks the furthest north the sun will appear in the sky. The sun will appear to stand still there at its northern zenith, and that’s the origin of the word solstice, from the Latin sol stetit, “sun stands still.” The days have been lengthening since the winter solstice in December, but now once again daylight begins to wane. Each day after the solstice there will be a few seconds less sunlight than the day before, and so it will go until the winter solstice comes once more next December. Each day slightly different than the one before and the one to follow: the constant rearrange. Even for those of us who do not like change, the understanding that change is forever happening.

It is the start of summer by the almanac, but by traditional reckoning of time, summer began at the start of May with the arrival of May Day. This older approach to time places the solstices and the equinoxes at the middle of each season, which is a considerably more logical approach. At least I think so. Looking at things as our ancestors did, it begins to seem odd to mark the start of summer with this last of the lengthening days, and the start of winter with the last of the lengthening nights. These days are, more naturally, midpoints of the seasons.

And so our ancestors thought of this time as Midsummer, with Midwinter at the winter solstice. Pagan festivals grew up around these celestial events and eventually, with the spread of Christianity, so did Church festivals. To Midwinter the Church attached the birth of Christ; to Midsummer, the birth of John the Baptist. And while we don’t celebrate these holidays precisely on the solstice, they are both solidly connected to the celestial events and the times of sol stetit with both Christmas and St. John’s Day just a few days after their respective solstice, the sun appearing to stand still at both.

Across cultures, these transitional times were long considered magical. Witches and fairies and sprites were more active, animals gained powers of speech. Our friend William Shakespeare was well attuned to this lore: his comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I have long loved, is set on St. John’s Eve. In the play, the realm of the fairies and the realm of the mortals blend as one, at least for a night or two. This is the magic that can attend these days, as the balance of light and dark on our planet begins to shift again. Summer is here, but it’s been here a while already. Magic is here, too, revealed to us if we are open. I love this, and these are some of my favorite days each year, even though they are not much celebrated. I think that’s too bad. I hope you’ll come back and read more about them here at the blog come St. John’s Eve on the 23rd: Old Midsummer Eve. For now, though: Solstice Greetings.

 

Image: Voyager Golden Record. It’s the gold aluminum cover designed to protect the Voyager 1 and 2 “Sounds of Earth” gold-plated records from micrometeorite bombardment. The cover also serves a double purpose in providing the finder a key to playing the record. The explanatory diagram appears on both the inner and outer surfaces of the cover, as the outer diagram will be eroded in time. Flying aboard Voyagers 1 and 2 are identical “golden” records, carrying the story of Earth far into deep space. The 12 inch gold-plated copper discs contain greetings in 60 languages, samples of music from different cultures and eras, and natural and human-made sounds from Earth. They also contain electronic information that an advanced technological civilization could convert into diagrams and photographs. Currently, both Voyager probes are sailing adrift in the black sea of interplanetary space, flying towards the outmost border of our solar system. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 1977 [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Jun 24 2016
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Midsummer, Solstice, St. John's Day

And Now Light Begins to Wane

Midsummer

All of our midsummer night’s revels and midsummer night’s dreaming of last night lead up to today: St. John’s Day, marking the birth of St. John the Baptist. We don’t typically celebrate the births of saints; all the other saints’ days mark the date of their deaths. But things are different with Mary and with John the Baptist. For them, we celebrate both. The Church early on placed the birth of John the Baptist at the Midsummer solstice and the birth of Jesus Christ at the Midwinter solstice. John is born at Midsummer, just as light begins to decrease. “He must increase, but I must decrease,” we read in John 3:30. Conversely, Christ is born at Midwinter, just as light begins to increase. Again, in John 8:12: “I am the light of the world.”

St. John is sacred to Puerto Rico, Québec, and Newfoundland. He is a patron saint of tailors, innkeepers, and printers like me. Tradition would have us cut and fashion divining rods on his day, for hidden treasures are thought to reveal themselves on St. John’s Day. Explore lonely places, it is said, and there these treasures shall be, awaiting any lucky finder. The magic passes with the day.

It is customary to eat strawberries on St. John’s Day, and in Estonia and Finland, a special St. John’s Day cheese is made, flavored with caraway seeds. Luckily no one has made a tradition of eating the foods that St. John himself is known to have eaten: “And his meat was locusts and wild honey” (Matthew 3:4). Try serving that at your next Midsummer dinner and watch your guests clear out in a hurry.

Image: Our St. John’s Eve bonfire last night, welcoming Old Midsummer. There may have been some Cognac involved. Afterward, I bound a pile of books and then cobbled together this Book of Days chapter. That may have been a result of the coffee before the cognac. The pile of books? Copies of Putting Up Mangoes, our tale of overwhelming subtropical abundance, which we’ll be featuring at the Midsummer Makers Marketplace at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts tomorrow, Saturday June 25, from 10 AM to 4 PM. If you come by, do say hello. Follow the roadsigns on campus to easy free parking. Admission is free, too!

 

Jun 23 2016
Midsummer, Solstice, St. John's Eve

Midsummer Magic

Midsummer, and all here is now hustle and hubbub as we prepare for the Midsummer Makers Marketplace at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts this Saturday. We’ll be there with a dozen other local makers and small creative businesses celebrating the local, the seasonal, and the handmade. We plan to show our full selection of culinary herbs and herbal teas from the Sabbathday Lake Shakers, our own framed letterpress prints, and copies of our book Putting Up Mangoes, for we are in the thick of mango season here in Lake Worth. I think we’ll bring a basket of mangoes, too, for it is that time of year when the magical fruits begin piling up, in the sink, in bags, in every nook of the refrigerator. An embarrassment of riches. I hope you can come see us; the marketplace runs Saturday June 25 from 10 AM to 4 PM at the Jaffe Center’s satellite book arts studios on the Florida Atlantic University campus in Boca Raton at historic building T6, near the FAU Football Stadium. There will be Makers Marketplace roadsigns to guide you in. Admission is free and so is parking.

Tonight, Old Midsummer, St. John’s Eve, Seth and I will light a fire in the backyard and we’ll have some celebratory something with it, joining in the fire tradition with people all over this globe. Perhaps you can join us in your way, too. Here, for your Midsummer night’s planning, is a reprint of a Book of Days chapter on St. John’s Eve from a year or so ago. Read it again, and connect with Midsummer traditions near and far. Happy Midsomer. ~ John

 

Viola Tricolor

St. John’s Eve, tonight, brings Midsummer. In the seasonal round of the year, we now sit directly opposite Midwinter and Christmas. The celebrations for both Midwinter and Midsummer are old celebrations, older than you or I or anyone can recall, older even than the events assigned to them by the early Church, for the Church early on recognized that honey draws more flies than vinegar, and in that spirit, old pagan celebrations continued but with new names and new focus. Hence the birth of Christ was set at the winter solstice and the birth of John the Baptist, the voice crying in the wilderness, setting the path straight for the savior, was set at the summer solstice.

St. John is unusual in that he is remembered not just on the day of his death (which is the case with all the other saints) but also on the day of his birth. And as is often the case with traditional holidays, it is the eve the night before when the real celebration occurs. My take on this is that there is a certain magic to nighttime events: perceived magic if not real, though our ancestors thought nights like Midsummer and Midwinter full of real magic and open to the realm of fairies and sprites and other folks of parallel universes. You need only look to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set on this very night, to grasp the beliefs.

But no matter whether you give credence to these other realms or not, there is no denying the air of mystery that accompanies a celebration at night. We hang fairy lights in the trees, we light candles and beseeching fires, we walk amongst flowers that bloom only at night and spice the air we breathe. We take our celebration outdoors and the stars and moon are above us and this is infinitely more mysterious than the ceilings in our homes. This, too, is magic, as powerful as any other.

Midsummer and St. John’s Day are not much celebrated in the States, much to our loss. But in other places, this is a night to spend out in the open air. In Scandinavia, with the sun at its northernmost point in the sky, this is the time of the Midnight Sun (how magical is that?). It is a night there for bonfires and meals of pickled herring and new potatoes with sour cream. Further south in Italy bonfires are also part of the night, but the meals vary by region. In Rome, the Midsummer meal centers around snails; local belief holds that eating snails, horned as they are like devils, will protect you from Midsummer mischief. In the towns of Northern Italy, Midsummer is a time to break out balsamic vinegar, aged as long as a hundred years. Every part of the meal has some of this nectar of the gods in it, for the lore of the land says that this is the time of year when the must enters the grape on the vine, and it is the must that will eventually become both the wine and the balsamic vinegar (again, magic). The must is the juice, crucial to both, for good balsamic vinegar is made from must just as is wine. It is then aged all those years in casks of various types of woods: at least a dozen years, but, as mentioned above, sometimes a hundred years or more.

It is a night to go and gather plants for their magical properties: fern seed and St. John’s Wort. The latter will protect you from evil, the former, if gathered properly, is believed to confer the power of invisibility. But not without some peril: the seeds are fiercely guarded by the fairy folk who know more of these secrets than do we. The magical properties of plants also play into Shakespeare’s comedy. Have you ever wondered what is the “herb” (a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound) that Oberon instructs Puck to fetch and squeeze the juice of onto the eyelids of Titania and then of the lovers? Well, these are the things I wonder about. Oberon goes on to tell us that maidens call it “love-in-idleness,” but in modern terms it turns out the herb is a flower known as Viola Tricolor, also known as Heartsease or Wild Pansy. You may have some blooming now in your summer garden. So much magic, so close to home. Make the most of it. Happy Midsummer.

Image: Viola Tricolor, Plate No. 227 in Bilder ur Nordens Flora by C.A.M. Lindman, published in 1905. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

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