Book of Days

SEVENTH DAY of CHRISTMAS
New Year’s Day

We’ve crossed the threshold from the old year to the new, and our journey through these Twelve Days of Christmas now grows more quiet and contemplative. At midnight, we toasted each other with wishes for a happy new year, but today, tradition would have us raise our cup once more. In an apple orchard, if you’ve access to one. But the Convivio way is to adapt old celebrations to what’s possible in our contemporary world. We live nowhere near an apple orchard (even orange groves are hard to come by ’round these parts these days). But we do have a yard and there are fruit trees there; we see no harm in continuing the traditions in a way suitable to our current reality. You should join us by celebrating in your unique way, too.

It begins with wassail. The toast is “Wassail!” and the drink is wassail, too. I made my first wassail when I was a teenager, for this is what unpopular teenagers do, and it was not very good, not at all. The recipe I followed came from a 1980s Betty Crocker cookbook. I remember cooking up a huge pot of the stuff on the stove in the kitchen at our house in Lighthouse Point. The result was insipidly sweet and put off my whole family from the start. But I’ve improved my research techniques since those younger years, taking bits and pieces of what I liked about various recipes, until I came up with this one. It is, I think, pretty wonderful. I think you’ll like it, too. The recipe here will serve a hearty group, but since we’re keeping to smaller celebrations this year, you may want to do what we’ll be doing and make just half of this recipe:

C O N V I V I O   W A S S A I L
Pour the contents of two large bottles of beer or ale (about 4 pints) into a pot and place it on the stove to heat slowly. Add about a half cup sugar and a healthy dose of mulling spices. (If you don’t have mulling spices on hand, you can use cinnamon sticks and whole cloves… though the mulling spices lend a more complex flavor.) Add a half pint each of orange juice and pineapple juice, as well as the juice of a large lemon. Peel and slice two apples and place the apple slices into the pot, too. Heat the brew but don’t let it boil, then pour the heated wassail into a punchbowl to serve.

New Year’s Day custom calls for us to share the wassail with those gathered but also to take the steaming punch bowl out to the orchard and toast the apple trees and share some with the oldest or biggest tree in the grove. Some folks pour the wassail on the trunk of the tree, while others dip the lower branches into the wassail bowl, and others may place wassail-soaked toast or cake in the branches of the tree. All of which are invocations of magic meant to encourage a good crop of apples next summer. Traditionally, the wassailing of the apple trees is done at the noon hour. Again, we believe you’d do best to let tradition inform your ways, but not dictate how your days go. So if your wassail happens to be late at night (as ours will most certainly be), there’s no harm in that.

Steaming punches like this were quite popular in olden times, on both sides of the Atlantic, and I am always up for bringing festive drinks like these back. A steaming punch begs to be accompanied by good Christmas songs and hearty exclamations like Huzzah! and Wassail! –– both of which have so much more spirit and gusto than our contemporary Cheers! Which is, of course, a good enough toast. But these twelve days are extraordinary days, so why not go for the superlative? One closing thought: in these strange pandemic times, perhaps we need a toast like Wassail! more than we know: the word comes to us from the Old English Wes Hel: “Be of good health!” Our wishes these days are simple; good health is something we would all take. And so then Wes Hel! Huzzah and cheers! And a happy new year to us all.

Image: That’s one of our annual Copperman’s Day prints. This one was made in 2017, and was inspired by the idea of wassailing and a general wish for good health (a wish, that year, for my dad). Copperman’s Day falls each year on the Monday after Epiphany. It is an old Dutch printers’ holiday, in which the print apprentices were given the day off to work on their own projects (which they then typically sold for a copper). We’ve been making Copperman’s Day prints most years since our first one in 2014. Like steaming bowls of punch, it is yet another Convivio Bookworks attempt at reviving old traditions. That’s us: ever the champion of the underdog.

Oh yes… to all you have said.
Tears streaming down my face… missing so much and so many.
Thank you to you and Seth from our very grateful hearts.
Was this the year to teach us how achingly we love?
–– Carl and Kathleen Maugeri

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: 2020 has been a helluva year. When I wrote my Christmas Eve Dispatch from Lake Worth at the start of the Christmas season, I didn’t realize it would resonate with quite so many people. But it did, because we are all feeling a bit weary, and our collective hearts are heavy. The response that moved me the most came from longtime Convivio Book of Days readers Carl and Kathleen Maugeri. I asked if I could reprint their message. They said sure. It’s that line about 2020 teaching us how achingly we love that punched me in the gut, just as much as Judy Garland singing “We’ll have to muddle through somehow” did when I heard those words last week before Christmas. Perhaps a year that teaches us things like this can’t be all bad. Be that as it may, tonight, we bid good bye to it, and hope for brighter days in the year we next enter.

SIXTH DAY of CHRISTMAS
New Year’s Eve, Hogmanay, First Footing

It’s the close of the old year, the welcoming of the new. It is a time of complete chaos, when you really think about it, and the symbolism of the New Year is potent magic. New Year’s Eve, which comes tonight, is perhaps the most common night of the year for symbolic foods and rituals. Visit the grocery stores here in Lake Worth and the first thing you’ll see upon entering are black eyed peas and fresh collard greens, and not too far from them, champagne and grapes. Champagne at midnight on New Year’s Eve has become rather universal. The peas and greens are traditional New Year foods here in the South. As for the grapes, well, one old Italian tradition in my family is to eat twelve grapes at midnight for twelve months of luck; we used to do this, but I don’t push it anymore. On my dad’s side, Grandma Cutrone used to make sure everyone had a spoonful of lentils at the stroke of midnight. In fact, the humble earthy lentil, cooked in various savory dishes, is very big throughout Italy for Capo d’Anno, the New Year. Lentils symbolize riches (think of each lentil as a coin, and you’d have quite a stash in each bowl). “Out with the old” is also very big in Italy for New Year’s Eve, and Italians traditionally make a clean sweep of things at midnight, opening the windows and tossing old useless possessions out onto the streets, no matter from what height (and with great gusto, no less). It can be a dangerous night for a walk about! The act is rich in symbolism, though: this is a night to shed what is unwanted, to dispel bad energy, to clear the way for good things to come.

The only New Year’s Eve tradition that seems to be a requirement for my family is the zeppole. These are different from the zeppole we buy for St. Joseph’s Day in March; New Year’s Eve zeppole are a sort of fried doughnut––a yeast dough, much like pizza dough, but enriched with eggs. Mom will make the dough and let it raise and sometimes it will bubble up over the sides of the bowl it’s proofing in and then she’ll spoon the dough into hot oil, stretching the dough as it slides into the fat. The result is a light, fried treat that comes in all sorts of shapes that remind you of all sorts of things as you eat them, whether they be drizzled in honey or dusted in powdered sugar or cinnamon sugar. They are so delicious. My dad loved them much more than he liked lentils.

In Scotland, the new year celebration is the biggest part of the Yuletide season. The celebration there is known as Hogmanay, which is believed to to be derived from the French au gui menez, “lead to the mistletoe,” and this suggests a very ancient and pre-Christian derivation of most Hogmanay traditions, for it leads directly back to the Celtic druids and the mistletoe that was sacred to their ceremonies. “First Footing” is an aspect of Hogmanay that feels particularly like a magic spell: The first person to step across the threshold of the front doorway after midnight is the First Footer, and it is hoped that this person would be a red- or dark-haired man carrying whisky or mistletoe or, in some cases, bread, salt and coal. In this case he would kiss all the women and shake the hands of all the men before placing the coal on the fire and the bread and salt on the table and then he’d kiss all the women and shake hands with all the men once more on his way out. This year, with social distancing, the First Footer will have to skip the kisses and handshakes. Lots of folks like to open all the windows and doors at midnight on New Year’s Eve, too; this, to cast out the old year and usher in the new. All that ventilation will serve us well this year, too.

And so fast away the old year passes. When next you hear from me, we will be amongst the six days of Christmas that fall in the new year, and the message will include our recipe for a hearty wassail. Plan ahead now by gathering the following: about 2 pints of beer or ale (a large bottle), a half pint each of pineapple and orange juices, an apple and a lemon, and mulling spices. Our wassail will provide you with a good way to welcome the year and will have you shouting, “Cheers and wassail, huzzah and good will to all! Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! May it be a good year for us all!”

Image: “An Old Woman at a Window, Emptying a Chamber Pot” by an anonymous artist, after Frans van Mieris the Elder. Painting, circa 1700–1724. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons. The combination of an open window and the emptying of a chamber pot feels appropriate as we proceed from this particular old year to the new.