Monthly Archives: January 2016

Jan 11 2016
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Copperman's Day, Plough Monday

Plough Monday & Copperman’s Day

Plough to Oven

Last week, St. Distaff’s Day signaled back to the workaday world for the women, and with the arrival of the Monday after Epiphany we have the official back-to-work-after-Yuletide day for the men: this is Plough Monday. There is a ceremonial ploughing of the ground on this day, which very often, in days of dirt roads, would be in the very road that ran through the village. The ploughs would be finely decorated, the men would parade in costume, there would be music and mummers and plays and a great hoopla of noise and all kinds of good sport. There would be a collection taken up door to door to pay for the tavern bill that came after; those who were too stingy to contribute risked having the path to their door ploughed, as well. Best, then, to contribute a few pennies to their sport.

When it comes to the costumes, the sillier, the better, and for sure there is a bit of the Feast of Fools, which we saw during the Twelve Days of Christmas, that comes into play on Plough Monday. It is traditional for one man in each Plough Monday gathering to dress as the Bessy, an old woman who we can link firmly to pagan goddess celebrations: she is the personification of the hag, the old woman of winter who, in the seasonal round of the year, will transform come spring into the virginal young goddess. And spring is not that far away in this world of spiraling circular tradition: Come February 2, we are halfway between Midwinter Solstice and Spring Equinox, a day marked by the holidays Candlemas, Imbolc, and Groundhog Day. It is a day seen in the traditional reckoning of time as spring’s first stirrings, even if winter still holds a strong grip. The sun is gaining strength by then, with considerably more daylight on the 2nd of February than there was on the 21st of December.

There is another old tradition in Holland on this First Monday after Epiphany, little known, but important to those in the print trade (and to us here at Convivio Bookworks, for we are, at heart, a print shop): It is Copperman’s Day, a traditional Dutch printer’s holiday in which the printshop apprentices would be given the day off so they could work on a project of their own. The small prints that were a result of the day were typically sold for a copper apiece.

We’ve been working at reviving this fine tradition and for the past few years have been creating a Copperman’s Day print. To date, they’ve all been mini-prints, the size of a standard postcard, printed letterpress by hand from historic wood and metal types. Each color a separate print run. It is slow and steady work and it often takes us more than a day to print them. In 2014, we printed our first Copperman’s Day print, which reads Take Joy. Last year’s, the second Copperman’s Day print, reads Take Peace. If these two lines sound familiar to you, you already know what this year’s print will read. All three of our Copperman’s Day prints so far are inspired by a Christmas Revels reading originally penned in 1513 by Fra Giovanni Giocando, who, on Christmas Eve of that year wrote a letter to his friend, the Countess Allagia Aldobrandeschi. In 1978, Fra Giovanni’s letter was distilled to its essence for the Christmas Revels performance at the beautiful Sanders Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here it is:

I salute you. There is nothing I can give you which you have not,
but there is much that while I cannot give,
you can take.

No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today.
Take heaven.

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant.
Take peace.

The gloom of the world is but a shadow.
Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy.
Take joy.

And so at this Christmastime,
I greet you, with the prayer that for you,
now and forever,
the day breaks
and the shadows
flee away.

And so we have beseeched you these past two years to take joy, to take peace. And now, we suggest you take heaven. Let our hearts find rest in it today. We’ll be working on this year’s Copperman’s Day print as best we can this day. We’ll let you know when it’s available for purchase. (It will most likely be ready later than today and it will be a bit more than a copper, sorry!)

 

Image: Detail from “Kronengrasse in Stockach” (Crown Alley in Stockach, which is a town in the district of Konstanz, Germany). It’s a series of tiles on a wall of a building there (the shop of a pretzel baker, I’d guess), photographed by Frank Vincentz in 2011 and used by permission of Creative Commons.

 

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Jan 07 2016
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St. Distaff's Day

Partly Work and Partly Play

YoungGirlwithDistaff

Christmas is past and now it is back to the ordinary workaday world. In older times, folks would cease most all work during the Christmas season, days considered outside of ordinary time. And here, on the heels of Epiphany, would come a number of traditional back-to-work holidays. The first comes today, and it is named for a saint who never did exist; rather, St. Distaff’s Day is named for a tool––one of those implements of the ordinary workaday world. Robert Herrick, one of our old favorite poets, wrote about St. Distaff’s Day in his 1648 book Hesperides:

Partly worke and partly play
Ye must on St. Distaff’s Day:
From the Plough soone free your team;
Then come home and fother them.
If the Maides a-spinning goe,
Burne the flax, and fire the tow:
Scorch their plackets, but beware
That ye singe no maiden-haire.
Let the maides bewash the men.
Give St. Distaff all the right,
Then bid Christmas sport good night;
And next morrow, every one
To his owne vocation.

The distaff and the spindle were the common tools of spinning flax into cloth (the spinning wheel came much later), and with St. Distaff’s Day this day after Epiphany, the women were back at their spinning. There was a more common division of labor back then, of course. Any woman who spun thread (and that would have been most women in earlier times) would know the distaff well. Some trivia for you to impress people at parties: Spinning was so associated with women’s work that the word spinster, which is happily not much used these days, once was a recognized legal term in England to describe an unmarried woman, and the terms spear side and distaff side were also legal terms to distinguish the inheritances of male and female children.

The men were not back at work in the fields until Plough Monday, which always falls on the Monday after Epiphany. And with the men still underfoot in the house, their job on St. Distaff’s Day seemed to be a mischievous one: their goal usually was to set fire to the flax the women were spinning. The women were wise to this custom, though, and typically kept several buckets of water nearby. Very often, it was the men who got the worst of it: to have a bucket of water dumped on you in the cold of January… for sure, St. Distaff’s Day lent a bit of excitement to the idea of returning to ordinary time. But this is the whole point of both St. Distaff’s Day and Plough Monday: yes, we may have to get back to work, but why not do it with a bit of ceremony and fun?

 

Image: “Young Girl with Distaff” by Pietro Rotari. Oil on canvas, early 18th century [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

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Jan 06 2016
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Christmas, Epiphany

Brightest and Best

FatherChristmas

TWELFTH DAY of CHRISTMAS
Epiphany

Do you know the old hymn “Brightest and Best?” I think it’s sometimes called “Star in the East.” No matter what you call it, it is a good song to sing for today, Epiphany: Brightest and best of the sons of the morning; Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid; Star of the East, the horizon adorning, Guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.

That star of the east guided the Magi, and Epiphany marks the day they arrived at the stable in Bethlehem and first beheld the divine child born at Christmas. Tradition tells us the Magi were three wise men: Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior. They each brought a gift to the child, gifts rich with symbolism: Gold for kingship, frankincense for the priesthood, myrrh for death and burial. The manifestation of the child to the Magi represented his manifestation to the broader world: it was no longer a local event.

When I was a boy, Mom would sometimes refer to Epiphany as “Little Christmas,” and this is certainly one good way to look at this unassuming holiday/holyday. It holds a special place in my heart because the passing of Christmas Day always made me a bit melancholy, even as a boy. Epiphany, or Little Christmas, gave me a bit of Christmas to hold on to all the way to the sixth day of January.

Over the years, our traditions for the day have grown to include a bit of practical magic. Some of you may do this, too, and if you don’t, perhaps you should, for magic is powerful stuff, and here is magic anyone can conjure: It is a simple ceremony at the front door, outside on the front porch, to close the celebration of Christmas on Epiphany night. We gather up all who are in the house and we each take turns writing with chalk on the lintel above the front door the numbers and letters and symbols of a traditional inscription. This year, it will read as follows: 20+C+M+B+16. These are the initials of each of the Magi, punctuated by crosses, blanketed on either side by the year. For me, the inscribing is always accompanied by a silent prayer that no one will be missing when we gather next to write this same inscription.

There are some years where the inscription is quickly weathered and by the following Christmas it is there only as a faint ghost of itself. Other years it remains clear as day throughout the year. All the year through, though Christmas be gone, still the inscription is there to remind us of Christmas’s 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.

Tradition tells us that this is the day to take down the Christmas tree. Some, in fact, think it bad luck to leave Christmas decorations up longer than Epiphany, though we don’t subscribe to this notion. We like to return all natural greenery back to nature. Wreaths and garlands can be composted for the garden, and the tree itself we set in a quiet corner of the garden to be saved as the fuel for our Midwinter Solstice fire come next year. It is a ceremonial and respectful way to honor the tree that has been the centerpiece of your Yuletide festivities all these days. So much more honorable than putting it on the trash heap. The pine boughs also make good compostable ground cover around roses (or so I learned from the Sabbathday Lake Shakers, and their gardens are worth emulating). In some circles, folks keep their greenery as cheerful decorations to their homes all the way through Candlemas on the Second of February, when Yule gives way to Imbolc and winter begins its shift to the earliest stirrings of spring.

In early December, before Christmas began, during Advent, we prepared our houses for the guest to come. The guest is the child, but also it is Old Father Christmas: all the traditions of thousands of years, through all the snow white ages. He comes to stay with us for a few short weeks each year, welcome or welcome not. It is right and good that we welcome the guest and when his time with us is done, to send him off into the cold dark night with warmth and kindness and respect. What we send out to the world so returns to us. This I believe and this is at the heart of my respect for the ways of the seasonal round, so as to more firmly connect us to earth and heavens. And each other.

Our Yuletide journey is near complete. Thank you for coming along with me. A few surprises still await: small and quirky celebrations, vestiges of Christmas that will remain for days to come. The first one is tomorrow. I suppose some things never quite end, and this, too, is right and good.

 

Image: “Old Father Christmas,” an illustration from Forrester’s Pictorial Miscellany for the Family Circle, 1855. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

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