Category Archives: The Gift Bearers

Dec 12 2020
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Advent, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Santa Lucia, The Gift Bearers

Sacred Candlelight

Such a sacred act, lighting a candle. That concentrated energy in the spark of the wooden match striking the flint, a small explosion of illumination, lighting the wick that burns the tallow. Like many things of wonder, it is an act that is potentially dangerous, and yet, kept in control, a thing of extreme beauty. So many of our sacred nights here at our home are illuminated by candlelight. (Perhaps they all are sacred: for months now, since this time of isolation began, Seth has been lighting candles at the dinner table each night.)

As I write this today, it is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and in the overnight hours as this day becomes the next, Sankta Lucia will arrive, too, with a wreath of candles upon her head, illuminating the dark cold night, this night that “walks with heavy steps.” I can picture all of the glass Guadalupe candles that are so ubiquitous in shops here in Lake Worth––from Botanica shops to the grocery store aisles––illuminated, too. Some folks are lighting Chanukah candles, and on the Advent wreath this Sunday, we illuminate two purples candles and the rose candle, too, for it is Gaudete Sunday, the Sunday of Advent where we add a measure of joy to our time of reflection. It is difficult to contain the joy that we know is coming with Christmas, and so the colors for this next week of Advent take on the joyful color of rosy pink, rather than somber purple.

And so here we are, practically midway through December already. The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on the 12th of December is sacred to all the countries of Latin America, but most especially to Mexico. As the story goes, in 1531, a fellow named Juan Diego was on a hill near Mexico City and there he saw an apparition of a woman. She asked him to build a church in her honor there on the hill. She spoke to him in his native Nahuatl language and he recognized her, by the things she told him, as the Virgin Mary. And it was on 12th of December in that year that the iconic image of Our Lady of Guadalupe that we know so well miraculously appeared inside Juan Diego’s cloak: on one of his visits to the hill, Mary told Juan Diego to go to the barren top of the hill, but when he got there, he found it not at all barren but covered with roses, all in bloom. He and Mary gathered the roses and she arranged them inside his cloak. And on this, her feast day, Juan Diego opened his cloak before the bishop of Mexico City. When he did, the flowers all fell to the floor, revealing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The bishop took it as a sign. The church was built, and the image from Juan Diego’s cloak, or tilma, hangs still inside the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Tepeyac Hill, Mexico City.

The 13th, a Sunday this year, brings St. Lucy’s Day: the Feast of Santa Lucia in Italy (where Lucia is pronounced loo-chee-a) and Sankta Lucia in Sweden (where the C is soft: loo-see-a). Lucia is sacred to both countries; she was born and lived and died in Sicily, but––perhaps because the nights are so dark in Sweden in December––she was long ago taken up there and celebrated. Lucia = Light, and light is a precious commodity to come by near the Arctic Circle around this time of the approaching Midwinter Solstice.

In Italy, children will wake up in the morning to find tiny presents tied to their shoelaces, as long as they’ve left hay and carrots in their shoes before they went to bed, for Santa Lucia’s donkey. Santa Lucia follows St. Nicholas as the next of the Midwinter gift bearers. In Sweden, typically there are processions on this night in celebration of Sankta Lucia: in churches, in schools, in city streets, on national television. Each features a Lucia, donning a wreath of glowing candles upon her head, with scores of her attendants: boys and girls dressed all in white, each bearing a candle, and then the Star Boys, each carrying stars on poles and donning tall white conical caps. It is one of the most beautiful sights of these ever-darkening nights on the approach to the solstice. In homes, too, Lucia will come in the early morning darkness, wreath glowing upon her head, delivering strong coffee and saffron scented buns, lussekatter, to all in the household.

It is a time that gets jumbled up in our home (and perhaps many other places, too) with things both Italian and Swedish. Even the music for this night is jumbled, for the song that is sung throughout Sweden this night (click here to listen) is Italian in origin, an old Neapolitan melody, transformed and rewritten for a place where, at this darkest time of the year, the night is vast:

The night walks with heavy steps around farm and cottage.
Around the earth, forsaken by the sun, shadows are lowering.
Then into our dark house she treads with lighted candles,
Sankta Lucia, Sankta Lucia.

The night is vast and mute. Now here reverberate
in all silent rooms a rustle as of wings.
See, on our threshold stands––whiteclad, lights in her hair––
Sankta Lucia, Sankta Lucia.

“The darkness will soon take flight from the valleys of earth.”
Thus she a wonderful word to us speaks.
The day shall again, reborn, rise from a rosy sky,
Sankta Lucia, Sankta Lucia.

On Sunday morning, my sister will make her Santa Lucia wreath––a sweet yeast bread, braided and round, a never ending circle like the circle of days, dotted with candied cherries and illuminated with four red candles. Another simple yet delicious treat we have but once each year, and we’ll enjoy it tonight with coffee after dinner. This is our Santa Lucia way.

All of us here––my mom, my sister, Seth and me––we wish you light and peace on these sacred illuminated midwinter nights.

Image: My sister Marietta’s Santa Lucia Bread. I wish we could pour you some coffee and cut a slice for you!

 

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Dec 05 2020
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Krampus, St. Nicholas, The Gift Bearers

Greetings from Krampus & St. Nicholas

The 6th of December brings St. Nicholas’ Day, but the 5th brings the Eve of St. Nicholas, the traditional night when St. Nick delivers presents to children in the lands where he is loved… especially Germany, Austria, Northern Italy, and the Netherlands. He is the first of the midwinter gift bearers, wending his way through these darkest nights.

On the Eve of St. Nicholas, the old bishop will make his rounds. Wise children will place their shoes by the chimney before going to bed in hopes that St. Nicholas will fill them with gifts. They’ll set out carrots and hay for his donkey. If they’ve been good, they might wake up on St. Nicholas’ Day to find their shoes filled with fruits and nuts and sweets and small toys. But St. Nicholas does not wander alone; he travels tonight with a dark companion. The companion goes by many names, depending on the region––Knecht Ruprecht, Black Peter, Pelznickel… but he is best known as Krampus: half man, half goat, horned and furry, with an astonishingly long tongue. St. Nicholas, dressed in his bishop’s robes and hat, concerns himself with the good children. Krampus deals with the naughty ones. He carries chains or birch switches and oftentimes a sack, in which he gathers up the bad children who deserve nothing more than to be carried away. It’s a bit terrifying, but also good fun––especially in the Krampusnacht parades that feature both St. Nick and Krampus.

I love the time of the Midwinter gift bearers. Such a beautiful way to make these darkest nights somewhat less dark (despite Krampus). St. Nicholas will be followed over the next few weeks by the Christkindl, by Santa Lucia, by Father Christmas and Santa Claus, by los Tres Reyes (the Three Kings) and a kind old witch named Befana who will sweep away the remnants of the Christmas season in early January.

But that’s all a long ways away. For us tonight here in this little old house in Lake Worth, we will leave our shoes by the bed, which we always do. Our small old home has small old closets, and so we almost always have a couple of pairs of shoes outside the closet––there’s just no place in the closet to put them. I don’t know if St. Nicholas and Krampus will make their way this far from Europe, but chances are good that once we go to bed, Haden the Convivio shop cat will spend some time hunting down her little stuffed animal toys––in particular, Cat in the Hat––carrying them about and making the odd cries that cats make once they have caught their quarry, and maybe tonight she will drop one of them into someone’s shoe, as she is wont to do so many nights. But before those magic overnight hours, we will brew ourselves some tea, or maybe some mulled wine, and we will for sure open a package of Steenstra’s St. Claus cookies, like we do each year on this night. The cookies are speculaas, a type of Dutch cookie made for St. Nicholas’ Eve. They sell them all year long at the Publix bakery in a small cellophane-wrapped package. The cellophane is clear and the box inside is bright orange. The Steenstra family emigrated from the Netherlands to Michigan in 1926, and that’s where the cookies are still made, as they have been for about 90 years now. They taste of almond and warm spices like ginger and clove, and they depict five different scenes about St. Claus (more correctly about St. Nicholas of Myra, the kind fourth century bishop who gave gifts to the poor while they slept). There is St. Claus on a horse (a derivation of that donkey), a boy and a girl (because they like to receive presents from St. Claus), a rooster (because St. Claus starts his day at sunup), an owl (because St. Claus works til sundown), and a windmill (because St. Claus lives in a windmill).

So whether you be visited by St. Nicholas or by Krampus, or by a cat that drops presents in your shoes, tonight something special is bound to happen. Enter the gift bearers onto the midwinter stage––there is good reason to celebrate this night.

Today’s chapter is a reprint of one published on December 5, 2019. It’s been a heck of a week here and the Eve of St. Nicholas has completely snuck up on me. It’s ok; these things happen. I did, however, just check the Publix delivery option for Steenstra’s St. Claus cookies and they did not come up… and so I may have to venture into the store myself to see if they are there. We do have wine, though, and we are stocked up with mulling spices. In fact, we use mulling spices so often during these midwinter nights, you may want to be stocked up with them, too. Here’s a direct link to the Shaker Mulling Spices we sell at our catalog. If you’re local and need some, order using the discount code PICKUP at checkout, which will deduct the $8.50 shipping charge, and I will bring them by to you if you live in the 33460 zip code, or you can come by here for a front porch pick up.

Images: Steenstra’s St. Claus cookies. At the top, a late 19th century or early 20th century Krampusnacht postcard from Germany.

 

Jan 05 2020
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Christmas, Epiphany, La Befana, The Gift Bearers, Twelfth Night

The Sounding Joy

We approach the close of the Twelve Days of Christmas. This Eleventh Day of Christmas has no particular traditions associated with it, but tonight is a different story, for this evening’s setting sun brings Twelfth Night, the Eve of the Epiphany. Epiphany marks the arrival of the Magi at the stable. Three wise men, strangers from distant lands. As such, they represent the manifestation of the child to the larger world, the world beyond the village of Bethlehem. They follow that star and repeat the sounding joy to all the world.

In fact, Epiphany is a much older celebration than Christmas. In the early days of the Church, the Nativity and the Epiphany were celebrated together on the 6th day of January. It wasn’t until the Council of Tours, in 567, that the two feasts were formally separated, with Christmas set on the 25th of December. Here in the States, our celebration focuses on Christmas Day, but in other places, this whole season is a time outside ordinary time, concluding only with the passing of Epiphany. And here’s what that might look like: a big feast tonight for Twelfth Night, which might include a big cake and in it, a bean or a whole nut or a trinket. The person who finds it is honored for the night with a suitable title, such as the King or Queen of the Bean. It’s a raucous night of revelry, typically accompanied by a good deal of ale or cider or wine. None of this stuff sat well with the Puritans, so while they ruled England, all of it was banned. Even Christmas itself.

Twelfth Night was never a big deal in our home, either. But Mom, who perhaps shares more of my enthusiasm for obscure holy days, has always called Epiphany, since I can remember, “Little Christmas,” and even as a kid, when I’d get a little sad about the passing of Christmas Day, she would be quick to remind me that we still had Little Christmas ahead of us. This always lifted my spirits. After I did a printing internship at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community and began learning more about Shaker Christmas traditions, what intrigued me most was their celebration of Twelfth Night each year. Each year, I’d ask Brother Arnold more questions, until finally we began having our own Twelfth Night celebrations. Sometimes they are big dinner parties and sometimes they are quiet gatherings. It generally depends on how much energy we have left at the tail end of a hectic Christmastime (and how much rich food we’ve eaten over the course of the Twelve Days). This year will be a quiet one, probably just the four of us: my mom, my sister, and Seth and me, and that feels, this time around, just right.

The highlight of our celebration will come with nightfall: we will gather outside the front door, whether it be cold or warm, with a step stool and a piece of chalk. In years past, the chalk was blessed by Father Brice, the parish priest, but Father Brice is dead and gone these ten or fifteen years now, and I’ve not heard a word about blessed chalk in any church since, no matter how much the building smells of incense and wonder. And so regular old chalk works just as well. Out on the front porch, standing on the step stool, we will each take turns writing the letters and numbers and symbols of an old inscription on the lintel above the door. This year, it will read 20+C+M+B+20. It’s the year (2020) and within the year, punctuated by crosses, come the initials of the Magi. Their names, handed down to us through tradition over the ages, were Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar.

It was that same Father Brice who taught us this tradition, and few and far between are the homes whose inhabitants seem to know it. But this past summer, when Seth and I were in Austria and Germany and Switzerland, I was pleased to see the inscription on doorways throughout the towns where we wandered. For me, on our front porch and on the porch of my family’s home, the inscribing is always accompanied by a silent prayer that no one will be missing when we gather next year to write the inscription again. Depending on the weather, the inscription may be there above the door for a month or it may be there all the year through. And though Christmas be gone, still the inscription reminds us of its presence as we pass each day through that portal. The inscription is a magic charm of sorts, protecting the house and those who pass through that doorway, harboring the goodwill and spirit of Old Father Christmas.

Ah but that is on Epiphany. Tonight, on the Eve of the Epiphany, Twelfth Night, the last of the Midwinter gift bearers will make their rounds. In Italy, la Befana, the kindly witch, will be on her broom, and in Latin America, los Tres Reyes, the Three Kings, will be traveling by camel. Their stories are intertwined. The Magi arrived at the stable with gifts for the child, and so they continue to bring gifts to children in the lands where they are most loved. In Italy, though, the legends get a little more interesting. It is said that the Magi stopped at la Befana’s cabin to ask for directions. They found her sweeping her floor. While they were there, they asked her to join them on their journey. “No, no,” she told them, “I’m too busy with my housework!” And so the Magi went on their way. But as she swept, la Befana grew remorseful that she had not gone with them, and so she stopped her sweeping, hopped on her broom, and left her home in search of the Magi and the child. But she never found them. Each year on the Eve of the Epiphany, she sets out on her journey again, in search of the child, delivering small presents to good boys and girls, and coal for the not so good ones. And it is la Befana who sweeps away Christmas for another year.

I have known so many Befanas in my day. It comes with the territory when you are of Italian descent. Women and men who clean and clean and clean, and who take great pride in their clean homes. My grandmother’s neighbor Tessie was known to roll the refrigerator away from the wall each and every day just so she could sweep behind it. All that cleanliness is a wonderful thing, of course, but you know each of these people would’ve said no to the Magi, too, just like la Befana herself did at that first Christmas. Would they, too, grow remorseful? Where does she even come from, la Befana? Well, she is an old hag… and so is the earthly goddess at Midwinter in the circular wheel of the year: Born in springtime, fair maiden in summer, mother in autumn, old woman in winter. A cycle repeating with each orbit around the sun, the story told again and again. Come Candlemas, at the start of February, when it is traditional to have every last vestige of Yuletide greenery removed from our homes, she will be reborn as Brigid, bridging us from winter to spring. The story never grows old.

Photo: A door within the chapel at the medieval Schattenburg Castle in Feldkirch, Austria. The castle was built in the 13th century. We saw inscribed doors throughout our travels in this part of Europe. This one didn’t have the date, just the initials, but all the other inscribed doors we saw had dates ranging from 2015 to 2019. Perhaps it just depended on who was living in each dwelling.

 

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