Monthly Archives: December 2020

Dec 28 2020
Christmas, Yule

Childremas

THIRD DAY of CHRISTMAS:
Holy Innocents’ Day, Childremas

Never underestimate the threat of an insecure, self-centered person in a position of power. Today we remember the poor children slaughtered by order of King Herod, the leader of Judea who felt threatened upon hearing the news of the Christ child’s birth. It is traditionally thought of as the most unlucky day of the year. The day was viewed with such great superstition in ages past that it was considered unlucky even to wear new clothes on the Third Day of Christmas, or to clip your fingernails, or to undertake any new project. Best to leave it for the following day, when good luck would return.

I personally don’t respond well to so much negativity, and I don’t agree with allowing an immature, unstable leader in history rob us of our peace and joy today. Doing so gives Herod too much power. I think a more positive approach in remembrance of all those lost that Third Day of Christmas is to honor the children in our lives and the children we once were: to reconnect with a time when we were more willing to suspend disbelief, more willing to be fully immersed in things, as children are wont to be. We leave childhood behind because we have to. But the child you were has certainly informed the adult you’ve become, so there is a thread that resonates across the years. This is something worth nurturing. The happiest, most engaged people I know still retain a measure of the wonder they knew as children.

One of the oldest midwinter traditions in the Church is the election of a Boy Bishop each St. Nicholas’s Day on the Sixth of December. He would be chosen from the choirboys, and he would rule until Childremas, this Third Day of Christmas. The office was serious business. The Boy Bishop wore full vestments and mitre, and he would perform all the duties of a bishop, save for celebrating mass, although he did often deliver the sermons. The actual bishop would, in some places, have to follow the orders of the Boy Bishop. These traditions tap into the ideas of the Feast of Fools, as well, where the normal order of things is ceremoniously reversed (which blends into the customs for the Fourth Day of Christmas, tomorrow), and perhaps relates to the words of the Magnificat: God has put down the mighty from their throne and has exalted the humble and the meek.

In medieval times, the Boy Bishop could be found in most every cathedral in France, Britain and Germany during the Yuletide season. The custom was treated with such seriousness that if he should die while in office, the Boy Bishop received the same burial honors as a real bishop. The 1869 Chambers Brothers’ Book of Days gives mention to one unfortunate Boy Bishop who did come to his end while in office, telling us that a monument to his memory may be found on the north side of the nave at Salisbury Cathedral.

In Spain and Latin America, the Third Day of Christmas is a day for practical jokes, the victims of which being called inocentes, although sometimes it is the prankster that gets that name in a plea for forgiveness. No matter how you spend the day, the theme, it seems, is universal: celebrating and honoring children. If it’s the child inside, how do we go about doing that? Keep it simple, I’d say. Are there favorite things you used to do when you were a kid that you just don’t do anymore? What was your favorite book back then, or your favorite movie, or your favorite thing to eat? Today, Childremas, is a good day to go back and give those things another try. Make it a playdate with the child you were. Get yourselves reacquainted.

Image: “Children by the Christmas Tree” by Leopold Graf von Kalckreuth. Oil on canvas, c. early 20th century. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

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Dec 27 2020
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Christmas, Yule

Mulled Wine Nights

SECOND DAY of CHRISTMAS
St. John’s Day

St. John the Evangelist was the only one of Christ’s disciples who did not meet a violent death for his beliefs. While his counterparts were martyred off, one by one, John lived to be an old man. Not that no one tried to get rid of him. There were many attempts on his life, and it is the most famous failed attempt that gives us our tradition for today, the Second Day of Christmas. The story goes that St. John was given poisoned wine, designed to kill him, but it had no effect on the man. And so on his feast day it is customary to bless our wine. In Europe especially, it is traditional to bring wine to church in order for the priest to bless it. This blessed wine is reserved through the year and given as a healing tonic to those who are ill. The blessed St. John’s wine is also thought by many to have a better flavor. And no need to bring all your stores of wine to the church for a blessing; blessed St. John’s wine is said to even confer better flavor on wine that is stored in its vicinity. That’s some powerful stuff.

Whether you have your wine blessed today at church or not, one thing is clear in the spirit of this merry Christmas season: it is a night for wine. In Italy yesterday for St. Stephen’s Day, folks ate roasted chestnuts and drank mulled wine, and tonight, for St. John’s Day, this festivity of the simple bounty of the earth will continue. The wine in Italy for these nights is typically of the mulled sort, spiced with cinnamon and cloves and orange peel. Here’s our recipe:

M U L L E D   W I N E
A bottle of good red wine
Mulling spices (a blend of cinnamon, cloves, allspice, orange peel)
Sugar

Pour a quantity (enough for as many people as you are serving) of good red wine into a stainless steel pot and set it on the stove over medium heat. Add about a teaspoon of mulling spices for each serving (we sell some wonderful mulling spices at the Convivio Bookworks website that are from the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community in Maine… they call it Mulled Cider Mix but it’s just as good in wine). Add sugar: start with a teaspoon or two of sugar and add more to taste. We prefer a less-sweet mulled wine, and while you can always add more sugar, you can’t take it away once it’s in. So my recommendation is to add the sugar gradually, tasting as you go. Heat to allow the spicy flavors to infuse the wine, but do not allow to boil. Strain before serving in cups (not glasses).

Here’s a little something you may find as fascinating as I did when I learnt it one Christmas from the folks at a favorite place of mine, Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts: It has to do with our common American expression, “Merry Christmas.” We rarely use the word “merry” other than at Christmas, and yet in England, where the idea of a merry Christmas began, the common greeting at this time of year is “Happy Christmas.” Christmas wasn’t a very big deal in America early on, mainly because the Puritans who settled in New England hated Christmas and made it illegal to celebrate the holiday. They were not fond of all the merriment that went along with a traditional populist Christmas celebration, and so they outright banned its observance. It was Charles Dickens and Washington Irving who really saved Christmas in England and America from extinction, and as Dickens’ Christmas tales grew increasingly popular in the States, folks here began following his texts, wishing a Merry Christmas to everyone they met.

In post-Dickens Victorian England, though, another round of anti-merriment clergy were getting their knickers in a bunch. This time it was the Methodists. They began promoting “Happy Christmas” as a more respectable greeting, more high-brow… and at its essence less merry, less drunken. That took hold in England, and even today, folks there are more likely to wish you a Happy Christmas.

Despite our Puritanical beginnings, “Merry Christmas” reigns here in the States. It is a decidedly secular greeting, less reverential, more festive. On this Second Day of Christmas, we wish you that lovely balance that contains a bit of both. The blessed (or not) wine and chestnuts pave the way, and when we raise our cups to you tonight, we will be wishing you all a Merry Christmas.

 

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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.

 

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