Category Archives: Yule

Dec 26 2020
4 Comments
Christmas, Kwanzaa, Yule

First Day of Christmas: Banish Grief

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. A strange Christmas, to be certain. If there has ever been a need for a Slow Christmas, it is now, this year, when we are feeling so bewildered and so disconnected from each other and from the traditional round of the year.

Here is what’s happening in corporate-driven culture this 26th of December, which has its way of trickling down to the culture of home: the stations on satellite radio that began playing Christmas music way back in October have abruptly stopped. Why they begin playing this stuff in October is anyone’s guess, and why they unplug it just as Christmas has begun has always felt bizarre to me, but Sirius XM has yet to consult with me on these matters. (Perhaps next year.) In stores, it is traditionally a day to pick up some bargains on holiday merchandise, though this year I think you’d be lucky to find anything left since Christmas, apparently, was just what we needed in this pandemic time. And you may begin to see unwanted Christmas trees tossed out on the curb as early as today, and certainly more and more as these next few days progress (especially after New Year’s Day).

My job as a Yuletide Traditionalist is to encourage you to slow down a bit. To that end, I’m going to encourage you to celebrate the next twelve days with me as the Twelve Days of Christmas, and to celebrate a proper close to the season come Twelfth Night and Epiphany, and to consider the spirit of Yuletide even in the days beyond on the road to Candlemas (a little known Christian holiday, at least here in the States) and Imbolc (another little known holiday, being its older Pagan counterpart) at the start of February.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s begin by backing up a day or two, and in case you missed it, here is a link to my Convivio Dispatch from Lake Worth, written in the dark night hours of Christmas Eve. Let’s use that to set the stage for the next twelve days, for here begins a period of time traditionally considered outside ordinary time: We enter the Twelve Days of Christmas. And this seems, of course, a good time to tackle the first controversy, and so here it is: There are two schools of thought on how to calculate the Twelve Days of Christmas. Is Christmas Day the First Day of Christmas? Some say yes, but we in this house subscribe to the venerable school of thought that places the first six days of Christmas in the old year and the next six days of Christmas in the new. Our ancestors loved the kind of magic that comes with numerical balance. It seems highly irregular to me that they would have felt right about a 12-day celebration, straddling two distinct years, that had seven days in one year and five in the next. But a balanced bridge that leads us out of one year and into a new one? Placing six days in the old year, six days in the new makes for an exquisite, beautiful balance. This is the sort of symbolism for which our ancestors strove… especially for an extraordinary time traditionally seen as outside the everyday. So when we talk about the Twelve Days of Christmas here, it is always inside this framework of balance. And so we come today to the First Day of Christmas.

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

On this First Day of Christmas, Father Christmas brings Boxing Day, celebrated in England and the Commonwealth countries. Servants typically had to work on Christmas Day, but the First Day of Christmas was their day to spend with their families. Their employers would send them home with boxes of gifts for themselves and for the families they were heading home to. Perhaps more important, though, it is St. Stephen’s Day. Stephen was the first Christian martyr, and so the Church assigned this first day of Christmas to him. In Italy, Santo Stefano’s Day is a big deal. Christmas Day is for family, but Santo Stefano’s Day traditionally is a day to bundle up and go out to visit friends and to visit nativity scenes. It is a day for roasted chestnuts and mulled wine (as is tomorrow, St. John’s Day: the Second Day of Christmas). My Aunt Anne and my mom say that my grandmother, Assunta, typically made soup for supper on this First Day of Christmas, when we remember Santo Stefano. The soup was a nice break from the rich fare of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Over in Ireland, it is the Day of the Wren. It is the wren that is traditionally thought to have brought bad luck upon the imprisoned Stephen, who was making his escape when a wren alerted the sleeping guards to the situation. His capture lead to his execution and martyrdom. Wrens were traditionally hunted on this First Day of Christmas, then paraded around town––we don’t subscribe to this sort of thing and I think it’s rare to find anyone doing it nowadays… but it’s good you know the history, no?

PREPARING for these TWELVE DAYS
There are common themes that run throughout Yuletide now that it is here, the heart of which is conviviality, the source of our Convivio Bookworks name. Being a pandemic time, it’s not the ideal time for such a thing, but certainly there can be conviviality within your home, and I don’t see why these Twelve Days couldn’t be celebrated with friends and family across newer channels, like Zoom or Skype. So don’t lose sight of the convivial aspect of the season.

There are certain pantry items that are good to have on hand this Christmastime. First: chestnuts for roasting. Just like ice cream is part of summer, roasted chestnuts, for us, anyway, are part of Christmas. Spirits, in the form of red wine and cider and Christmas ale (if you drink these things) are second, for many of the Twelve Days of Christmas customs call for these things. (Don’t get carried away, now: the Puritans banned Christmas because it was, in their day, a time of drunken revelry. If there’s anything we despise, it is extremism in either direction. We don’t advocate drunken revelry, but we do advocate moderation and enjoyment.) Third: stock up on unusual ingredients that you may not necessarily have (and if you do, it may be time to replace them). Things like mulling spices, honey, and rose water will come in handy as the celebrations of the Twelve Days of Christmas progress. You’ll find excellent quality mulling spices and rose water at our catalog, made by the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community. (Locals, use discount code PICKUP at checkout and the $8.50 shipping charge will be deducted from your order. We’ll arrange a time for you to come by our front porch for pick up, or, if you live in the 33460 zip code, I’ll be happy to make a delivery to your house by bicycle. Everyone else: we ship via USPS Priority Mail, which is two days to most destinations in the country.)

It is my sincere wish that you will join us in celebrating Christmas through all these days, to the season’s close on Epiphany, the 6th day of January. If your heart truly loves Christmas, do things in your own time, and know that in many traditions, Christmas is a season that carries on all the way to Candlemas, on the 2nd of February, and that is typically how we go about the season here. But we are a couple of old softies who love Christmas dearly. Do what feels right to you, that’s my recommendation. Even if it seems out of step with everyone else around you (because it can feel that way––but hopefully you are all wise enough to not care about things like that). Celebrate this way, and know that at the very least you have two odd fellows in Lake Worth joining you in spirit and raising their glasses with you throughout the season. And that’s not so bad.

KWANZAA
December 26 also begins the first of seven nights of Kwanzaa, the celebration of African American culture that, like Advent and Chanukah, involves an ever increasing source of candlelight during the dark nights of the Midwinter solstice. It is a relatively new celebration, as holidays go, introduced in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Kurenga, who placed the celebration at Midwinter in direct response to the commercialism he saw in Christmas. Kwanzaa begins December 26 and runs through the First of January, with each day focusing on one of seven principles: first, umoja (unity); then kujichagulia (self-determination); next, ujima (collective work and responsibility); followed by ujamaa (cooperative economics); and then nia (purpose); kuumba (creativity); and finally imani (faith). Dr. Kurenga’s wish was for African Americans to be proud of their heritage and culture. That is a noble thing indeed.

Images: Our punchbowl gets a lot of use this time of year. It’s a lovely old ceramic punchbowl, made in England, probably close to a hundred years old. The verse in the first photograph is at the bottom of the bowl, visible once the punch has been drunk, and the scene in the second photograph is one of three that illustrate the verse, both in the bowl and on the cups. The verse reads:

Fill your cups and banish grief,
Laugh and worldly care despise;
Sorrow ne’er will bring relief.
Joy from drinking will arise:
So pour this full and sup it up,
And call for more to fill your cup.

 

Tagged
Dec 20 2020
6 Comments
Advent, Midwinter, Solstice, Yule

Midwinter

And now it is Midwinter, and I am here to tell you again the same story, the story I tell you each year on this darkest night. It never grows old (I don’t think so, anyway), for it is the story of our home, our planet, our place in this vast mysterious universe. It is a story rooted in science and perhaps in divinity and certainly in celestial mechanics: at about 5:02 AM––early Monday morning here in Lake Worth, which is in Eastern Standard Time now––the planet will reach its solstice moment. The sun, which has been tracking further and further south on the horizon since last June, appears to stand still for a few days––tracking no farther south. And herein lies the etymology of the word solstice: sol = sun; stice = static, stand still. By Tuesday, already, things will begin to shift the other way, and we will be on our slow and patient way toward summer.

Ah, but that is already the future, and tonight it is the present we are concerned about. It is the Midwinter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere: our longest night of the year, our shortest day. Out of these darkest nights come our deepest joys: all of the celebrations of Midwinter that have come to pass and that are on the horizon. The feasts of St. Nicholas, of Santa Lucia, and of Our Lady of Guadalupe; the eight nights of Chanukah; the ever increasing light of Advent, and still ahead, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and the Twelve Days of Christmas that follow. These are days and nights of adding our light to the sum of light, of understanding that joy comes out of our countering what is dark with light.

The science behind all this is the simple fact that our planet rotates on its axis at a tilt of about 23.5 degrees. As we spend our year revolving around the sun, the pole that is tilted toward the sun experiences spring and summer, the pole that is tilted away experiences autumn and winter. Were it not for that 23.5 degree tilt, we would have no seasons. The round of the year would not be the same, would it? We would lack that constant rearrange––each day slightly different from the one before and the one to come. Experienced day by day, the change is not terribly noticeable. Stack them up and view them as a year, though, and our world turns upside down with change. Many of us are not fond of change (I can be like that), and yet our planet is constantly in flux. Nothing stays the same, and yet nothing really changes. That is the paradox of our round of the year, and that is the paradox of a tilted axis, too. It is sublime, and divine, and it is the beauty of physics and science. How wonderful (how completely filled with wonder) is that?

Image: Earth daylight distribution on the December 2020 Solstice (Northern Winter; Southern Summer) as seen on w:SpaceEngine. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

 

Jan 31 2020
4 Comments
Candlemas, Christmas, Imbolc, St. Brigid's Day, Yule

Sage Advice

Busy weekend ahead! For those of us who want a goblin-free home (and let’s face it, who doesn’t these days?), it is time to remove all remnants of yuletide greenery. This is sage household advice that comes to us from the 17th century British poet, Robert Herrick. Herrick included a poem, “Ceremony Upon Candlemas Eve,” in his book Hesperides. Here’s an excerpt:

Down with the rosemary, and so
Down with the bays and misletoe ;
Down with the holly, ivy, all,
Wherewith ye dress’d the Christmas Hall :
That so the superstitious find
No one least branch there left behind :
For look, how many leaves there be
Neglected, there (maids, trust to me)
So many goblins you shall see.

This advice was nothing new in Herrick’s day; Herrick was simply recording an old custom, one that is as good as any to follow. So if you, like us, still have a Christmas tree in your living room… well, tradition would suggest it’s time to let it go. For us, it’s been a fine Christmas season with that tree. We got it just before Christmas and didn’t get around to decorating it until Christmas night, and so it’s been no trouble at all keeping it all this time. Haden the Shop Cat loves sleeping in her kitty tower beside the tree, and chances are quite good––if we are to judge by her habits––that although the tower will remain there, once the tree is gone, she will stop sleeping in it. Cats, too, seem to have their yuletide traditions. And so on Saturday night, which is Candlemas Eve, we will pack away the ornaments for another year, and the lights, and we will bring the tree out to the garden, where it will rest for all the months to come. All through spring, summer, and fall, we will steal occasional whiffs of Christmas from it as it dries. And come next Midwinter Solstice night, we will use it as fuel for our outdoor fire to illuminate the darkest night of the year.

Ah, but already the nights grow shorter, less dark. It’s been just about six weeks since the solstice of December, and daylight in the Northern Hemisphere has been increasing a little day by day, and now we come to February and a cross quarter day in the round of the year: February 1 brings St. Brigid’s Day, and the old, mostly forgotten holiday known as Imbolc. It is the first step we take on the bridge from winter to spring, and how fitting her name, then: Brigid, as bridge. It is traditional, for her day, to fashion St. Brigid’s crosses out of rushes or straw and to leave an oat cake and butter on a window sill in your home; this, to encourage Brigid to visit your home and to bestow blessings on all who live there. She is the bridge from winter to spring but more immediately from Christmas to Candlemas, which comes on the 2nd of February. The Christmas decorations will be packed away and the greenery returned to nature, and as the sun sets on Candlemas day, it is traditional to go through the house, illuminating every lamp, even for just a little while. In many parts of Europe, crepes will be served for dinner. In Mexico, it’ll be tamales with hot chocolate, heavily infused with cinnamon.

Here in the States, perhaps the best known marker of these important days that bridge winter to spring is the groundhog who comes up from his burrow every Second of February. Candlemas is a traditional weather marker (If the sun shines bright on Candlemas Day / The half of the winter’s not yet away) and this is what survived for us, of all things. Me, I prefer the tamales and the hot chocolate and the lighting of lamps. With Candlemas, we are now forty days past Christmas. This takes us back to an old Hebrew tradition: forty days after the birth of a son, women would go to the temple to be purified. And so Mary did this, for it was her tradition, and when she did, it was there at the temple that she and her infant child ran into the elders Simeon and Anna, wise and all seeing, who recognized the child as the light of the world. This is the narrative basis for Candlemas, for the blessing of candles this day, and the connexion between the story and the celestial events that bring us closer to spring. And so here is my favorite music for Candlemas: It’s an old hymn called “Jesus, the Light of the World,” recorded by one of my favorite ensembles, the Boston Camerata. It’s from their album An American Christmas. I think of it as more a Candlemas song than a Christmas song, and it’s a fine song to sing or hum as you light all those lamps in the house and a fine album to play as the last vestiges of Christmas are stored away for yet another year. And with that, the bridge we stepped upon at the start of Christmas is behind us, as we step upon the bridge that lies ahead of us, the one Brigid lays before us, toward spring.

Image: A quickly made print, printed on the Vandercook press today, from handset metal types. More sage advice.

 

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