Category Archives: Ramadan

Mar 01 2025
6 Comments
Book of Days Calendar, Lent, Ramadan, Shrove Tuesday, St. David's Day

Daffodils, or Your March Book of Days

And now it is March. The month begins this year with a new moon and Ramadan, the lunar monthlong celebration in the Islamic calendar focused on daytime fasting, good deeds, and prayer. It’s a holiday dependent on the local first sighting of the crescent moon, so it began yesterday in some places, and begins today in others, and possibly even tomorrow in yet other places. All month long, observers will enjoy a big meal, called suhoor, each day before the sun rises, and won’t take any food or water until the sun sets. When it does, the fast is broken usually with a date, and then another big meal, this one called iftar. And so it will go, all through the lunar month, through all the phases of the moon, until the sighting of the next crescent moon, when Ramadan ends and Eid al-Fitr begins: three days of feasting and gift-giving and remembrance of all that Ramadan taught us.

Whilst Ramadan is a movable holiday, one that comes earlier and earlier each year, one constant holiday on the First of March each year is St. David’s Day. The day is sacred to Wales. It’s a day for leeks and daffodils, but even better: for Welsh Cakes. Here’s our recipe; serve the cakes with strong tea with milk and sugar:

W E L S H   C A K E S

It’s not uncommon to find recipes for Welsh Cakes that call for regular granulated sugar, butter, and nutmeg, but the traditional recipe will add lard to the mix, use caster sugar in place of the regular sugar, and will be flavored with the more mysterious flavor of mace. If you want the best Welsh Cakes, stick to the traditional version. If you can’t find caster sugar, make your own: pulse regular granulated sugar in a blender until very fine. Do not use powdered confectioners’ sugar, which has added corn starch.

3 cups all purpose flour
½ cup caster sugar
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground mace
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons lard
6 tablespoons butter
¾ cup dried currants
2 eggs, beaten lightly
3 to 4 tablespoons milk
granulated sugar

Whisk together the flour, caster sugar, baking powder, mace, cinnamon, and salt in a mixing bowl, then work in the butter and lard with your fingers until the mixture has the texture of course crumbs. It’s ok if some larger chunks of butter remain. Mix in the currants. Add the beaten egg, working it into the mixture, adding just enough milk to form a soft dough that is not too sticky. Wrap; chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes or until you are ready to make the cakes.

Turn the dough out onto a floured board and roll to a thickness of about ¼”. Using a biscuit cutter (scalloped, if you have one), cut into rounds. Gather up any remnants to roll out again and cut more cakes.

Heat a lightly buttered skillet (cast iron works great) over low to medium heat, cooking the cakes until each side is lightly browned (about 3 to 4 minutes… if they’re cooking quicker than that, lower the heat). Let the cakes cool for a minute or two, then set each in a bowl of granulated sugar, allowing sugar to coat both sides and the edges. Best served warm, split, with butter and jam, or, for a more savory treat, with cheese and leeks, at a table set with a small vase of daffodils.

The daffodils are traditional for St. David’s Day in Wales, as are leeks, and if you’re there today, you may find folks wearing one or the other in their lapels. The legend of the leeks goes back to an ancient battle in Wales in which St. David himself is said to have advised the Welsh troops to wear leeks in their caps in order to distinguish themselves from the Saxon troops they were fighting. This animosity between the Celtic Welsh and the Saxon-descended English went on for some time, and there’s an old story about a man traveling on horseback in the north of Wales who comes to a river that he wishes to cross. There was another fellow working the field nearby, so the man on horseback asked, in English, if it was safe to cross the river and the laborer replied, in English, that it was indeed. The horse, however, knew better, and refused to pass into the river. So the man upon the horse asked the laborer once again if it was safe to cross the river, this time in Welsh. “Oh, I beg your pardon, sir,” said the man on the ground. “I thought you were an Englishman.”

Let’s hope the animosity has by now subsided. I love leeks, but it’s the daffodils that I’ve chosen to focus upon for your Convivio Book of Days calendar for March. The calendar is our monthly gift to you, a printable PDF and a fine companion to this blog. March this year will be dominated by the forty days of Lent, and on Tuesday night, we’ll be eating pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, the night that brings an end to the Carnival season. Ash Wednesday the next morning will usher in our annual season of penitence: a season that came out of necessity in times past, but this year, perhaps this somber time has its place for those of us who feel a need to step back from the madness of the world. Forty days to attempt to make sense of what’s become of things, to reflect, to reset, to understand what is most important to us and to decide how we wish to live our lives: by the strange examples we see daily these days from the people who are supposed to be role models and exemplars of respect and integrity and compassion, or by our own internal compass that comes from both spine and heart.

COME TO THE SHOP!
Locals: the shop is open Saturdays from 11 AM to 4 PM at 1110 North G Street, Lake Worth Beach, FL 33460. (Do take note, though, that we’ll be closed Saturday March 22 and Saturday March 29.) And we’ve got two special events for you in March. First up, it’s our St. Patrick Market on Saturday & Sunday, March 8 & 9, from 11 AM to 4 PM each day. We’ll be playing Celtic music and featuring our offerings for St. Patrick’s Day and for St. Brigid’s Day and serving homemade Irish soda bread and our own Löfbergs Swedish Coffee while you shop. The following week, come back for our San Giuseppe Market on Friday evening, March 14, from 5:30 to 8:30 PM, and on Saturday, March 15, from 11 AM to 4 PM. At this event, we’ll be playing Italian music and featuring our offerings from Italy and serving our Löfbergs Coffee with homemade Zeppole di San Giuseppe, the classic Italian pastry that we enjoy once each year to celebrate St. Joseph’s Day. Both events should be great fun. You’ll love what we have in store for you! As for the rest of you, you’ll find all these offerings (minus the soda bread and zeppole, sorry) when you visit our online shop. We appreciate your support! (Click the images below to make them larger.)

Image: Daffodils in a Vase by John Singer Sargent. Oil on canvas, circa early 1890s [Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.]

Apr 05 2023
4 Comments
Book of Days Calendar, Holy Week, Passover, Ramadan, Spring

Spring Green, or Your April Book of Days

And here now is your belated Convivio Book of Days calendar for April. Cover star: “Beech Trees in Springtime,” an 1897 oil painting by Christian Zacho. It is filled with the ephemeral spring green of newly leafed trees, which, if you are lucky, you will be seeing a fair amount of in the coming weeks, as spring comes into its own. An annual bit of wonder and renewal. We see it even here, in this strange green land, in an albeit subtle way: passing by a stand of bald cypress, for instance, as we drive across the state on Alligator Alley. It is a fine time to take a drive or to take a walk and see something new and fresh and green.

We find ourselves, too, in the midst of an important week, across cultures and spiritual traditions: Ramadan continues and at sundown tonight, Passover begins. And it is Holy Week, a week of complexity and mystery in which the forty days of Lent, which we’ve been immersed in since Ash Wednesday, will come to a close. It began last Sunday with Palm Sunday. Thursday will bring Holy Thursday, or Maundy Thursday, when tradition would have us visit three churches in the moonlit night, Friday will bring Good Friday, when we commemorate the passion of Christ, and Saturday the vigil through which we wend our way toward Easter.

What I know about Ramadan is not much and what I know about Passover is perhaps just a bit more, and is mostly is in relation to my Catholic upbringing and to Passover’s connexion to the Easter story. I know that Passover commemorates the liberation of the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt, and I know what a friend told me once, which has always resonated with me about the holiday: “We are traveling through the desert with our ancestors via a table filled with metaphor and symbolism.” The meal is the seder, the same meal that Jesus celebrated with his disciples in the upper room on that Holy Thursday night before he died. Pesach is the Hebrew name for Passover, and Pesach informs the name for Easter in many languages. Hence our Italian word for the day and season: Pasqua. And while Ramadan roams the calendar, falling a few weeks earlier each year, Pesach, Pasqua, and a full- or near-full Paschal moon are all constant companions based on the timing of the spring equinox.

The Last Supper is the Passover meal in the upper room that is commemorated at the Mass for Holy Thursday. Each year, as Lent begins, I think to myself, “This is the year I’m going to do things right.” I imagine myself taking the time to give the forty days their proper space and time, to be more mindful, and give them more reverence. And each year those forty day zip by and I find myself here, at this junction where Lent runs headlong into Holy Week, and I realize I just have these few days left to make things right. Holy Thursday is my night to do this. I drag Seth along with me, if he has it in him, on a Holy Thursday pilgrimage that my grandmother taught me: as the rest of the world is contemplating sleep, we will head out into the night and visit three churches. The churches that know Grandma’s ways will keep their doors open late into the night, or even throughout the night until morning. The moon is our companion through this pilgrimage, along with a few other hearty souls who visit the churches with us. The churches will be dim but warm with candle glow and quiet and the presence, to me at least, of all the loved ones I bring with me in my heart. I sit, I kneel, I pray, I ponder. It is a night like no other, the strongest bridge I know between realms. We each, of course, bring to it what we bring, but this is what my Holy Thursdays, my Maundy Thursdays, are like, and I feel truly at home in the mystery.

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IT MAY BE NOT TOO LATE to order things from our website for Easter. We ship US Priority Mail, which is two days to most domestic destinations, so chances are good you’ll have your order by Saturday. Locals, of course, we can deliver to you or you can come pick up at our front porch. It’s a little too warm these days to ship our German chocolates for Easter, but locals: I don’t know that there’s anywhere else nearby where you’ll find German milk chocolate bunnies and German marzipan bunnies. We have a few left of each. Plus Ukrainian pysanky, wooden bunnies and splint wood baskets and paper mache eggs from Germany, handmade egg-shaped candles from Sweden…. many Easter delights await you at Convivio Bookworks! CLICK HERE to shop. And use discount code BUNNY at checkout to get $10 off your purchase of $85 on all our offerings, plus free domestic shipping!

AND WON’T YOU JOIN ME this Friday, Good Friday, via Zoom for Real Mail Fridays? It’s a weekly online social I host for the Jaffe Center for Book Arts. Good Friday is an odd day for a social, I know, so the approach I’m planning is this: a more subdued soundtrack for the first two hours, and then we’ll devote the final hour of our gathering to a most sublime recording called “Lamentations: Holy Week in Provence.” It’s by the Boston Camerata. “Lamentations” is a most beautiful piece of music, and we will play it uninterrupted from 4:00 Eastern to the close of our online social. We do bill Real Mail Fridays as a letter writing social, but the folks who join us each week from around the globe do all kinds of interesting things during our time together. We’ll begin as we always do, at 2:00 Eastern. Come and go as you please but do consider joining us for “Lamentations” beginning at 4. No matter your faith tradition or your beliefs, it is a most special way to mark the day. CLICK HERE to join us Friday between 2 and 5 Eastern.

 

Image: “Beech Trees in Springtime” by Christian Zacho. Oil on canvas, 1897. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Apr 12 2021
Eid Al-Fitr, Ramadan

Under the Crescent Moon

Ramadan moves through the year, each year earlier and earlier, and this year it begins with the sighting of this month’s new crescent moon, which in most places is expected to be this evening, this 12th of April. It’s not so much that Ramadan moves around as that it always comes in the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, and the calendar, being a lunar one, operates differently from solar calendars. Ramadan was a summer holiday a few years ago, and now it is a spring holiday, and it won’t be long before it is a winter one… and sometimes Ramadan can come twice in a solar year, which will happen next in 2030, when it will be celebrated in January and again the following December.

Ah, but now it is spring and now comes Ramadan and with it, Muslims will fast during the daylight hours and eat and drink only when the sun is down, all through this month from one crescent moon sighting to the next. It is a time of reflection, a time of thankfulness, a time to gather with family, and a time, more so than other times of the year, for good deeds. Before the sun rises each day, many families will enjoy a big meal called suhoor, a meal meant to sustain through the day. (This is definitely not the time for a slice of buttered toast for a pre-dawn breakfast!) And once the sun sets again, the fast is broken with a sweet delectable date, followed by a meal called iftar.

With the sighting of the next crescent moon, this year in May, Ramadan will conclude with a big feast called Eid al-Fitr: the Sweet Festival. Our friend Manal Aman of Hello Holy Days! in Canada has for years been following her calling to make these holidays mainstream, something familiar to us all. She designs cards for Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr, and other products, too, like countdown calendars and gift bags. Her work is gorgeous, and, I think, so important in helping us build bridges rather than walls. We sell her cards at Convivio Bookworks and encourage you to have a look and if you know people who celebrate these holidays, join us in sending them greetings. In fact, this year, we are participating in Manal’s Great Big Eid Card Swap and we’ve been buddied-up with a pen pal in Jackson Heights, New York. I am putting our card in the post today. You’ve got a whole month––all the way until the next crescent moon––to do the same for your friends who are celebrating. And when you do, tell them, “Ramadan Mubarak!”

Shop our collection of Manal’s cards for this season of Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr by clicking here. And back in November, Manal interviewed me on Instagram TV for her series ahead of Small Business Saturday; we had a fun time chatting about the book arts, about my mom, about our Shaker Rose Water and my experience as a print intern at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community, and why it’s so important to us to carry Manal’s work in our shop. You can watch the 30-minute interview by clicking here.

 

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