Author Archives: John Cutrone

Oct 06 2016
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Book of Days Calendar

Your October Book of Days (or, Riding out the Storm)

oct16-pumpkins

Lots going on these days! It was Seth’s birthday on the last of September and then we segued right into my mom’s 90th birthday at the start of October, so it was, oh, nonstop celebration all weekend. Then at work on Monday I walked in to learn that there had been a water leak all weekend; by the time the water mitigation crew left for the day on Monday night, their amazing vacuum equipment had sucked over 300 gallons of water out from under the bamboo floorboards. The drying-out process will continue for at least another week. And still that same day we learnt that the forecast track for Hurricane Matthew was beginning to suggest that he had us squarely in his sight. And so Tuesday at work we prepared for the storm, and Wednesday we prepared the home of an old family friend. Thursday morning we will prepare ours, and then we will wait.

This is all to say I’m sorry, but I am just now getting around to letting you know that your Convivio Book of Days Calendar for October 2016 is posted to our website. It is a printable PDF, ready to print on standard US Letter size paper, and a great companion to the Convivio Book of Days Blog. Cover stars this month: pumpkins photographed just last week, before all the madness began, at our friends Leif and Jeffrey’s home––these green pumpkins are from last year’s harvest! They’re still looking beautiful. And any friend of pumpkins is a friend of mine.

Over at the Convivio Book of Days Catalog, we are trying something new: we’ve operated for years under a flat $8 shipping fee policy, but now if you spend $50 at the Convivio Book of Days catalog, you’ll get free shipping. Magic words, aren’t they? FREE SHIPPING. I love them, too. We’ve also figured out a way for folks outside the US to order (you’ll see a flat $30 shipping charge on your invoice, but we will contact you with the actual shipping rate before we ship or charge your card and will adjust the charge accordingly… most likely your actual shipping charge will be less), so that, too, is something new.

Also new are lots of new items added to the catalog––mostly handcrafts from San Miguel de Allende for your Day of the Dead and Halloween celebrations but also lovely screen printed tea towels for cider season. (Speaking of cider: don’t forget the Shaker mulling spices.) We’ve also added about a dozen new German advent calendars this week, too, and as long as we have power during the storm, I’ll work on adding some new Christmas and letterpress items, too. Right after I bake a batch of granola for Seth.

Pretty soon we will have reached the point where we have done all we can to prepare, and we will take shelter. There seems to be, at least here in Lake Worth, no need for evacuations, so we plan to stay put, Seth and me and Haden the Convivio Shopcat. We will watch the wind and rain from the shelter of this old house. The house is wood, cedar and old Dade pine, tough as nails, but it will creak and moan a lot, especially as we get into the thick of things, and there will be times when things will get a little scary. We know this; we’ve done it before. We’ll be okay, we all will be, you, too.

Now go on: get shopping. Spend 50 bucks, make us pay for that shipping. We promise to take good care and to not send anything out until the rain has passed. Happy October.

 

Oct 02 2016
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Rosh Hashanah

A Sweet Year Ahead

Taglach

Tonight’s setting sun brings a new year in the Jewish calendar. It is Rosh Hashanah. It begins with the sounding of the shofar, a hollowed out ram’s horn, which gives the day another common name: the Feast of Trumpets. The celebration of the new year concludes ten days from now with solemn Yom Kippur; these are the high holidays/holydays of the Jewish calendar.

What I know of Rosh Hashanah is little, but what I love best are the simple things. Years ago at this time of year, at one of the local bakeries near to where my family lives, we would find pie tins full of honey-dipped balls of fried dough mixed with cherries and chopped nuts: Teiglach is its name, we found, and it was part of the Rosh Hashanah celebration, but we would bring it home each year because it reminded us of the struffoli we would make for Christmas. Teiglach provided an early autumn precursor of our delicious honeyed Italian yuletide dessert. And one September not long ago, Seth and I and the rest of my family got to share a Rosh Hashanah celebration with our niece’s family. There was homemade challah bread, round to symbolize the circle of the year, and there were apples dipped in honey, to symbolize a sweet year ahead.

There was much more, I know. There were prayers, and there were pressed linens, and there were more elaborate things to eat on the table. But it is the bread and the apples and the honey that I remember best. The simple things. Happy new year: Shanah Tovah.

This is a reprint of last year’s Convivio Book of Days chapter for Rosh Hashanah. New year, same message. The image features a recipe for Aunt Ida’s Taglach (which seems to me for sure like a variant spelling of Teiglach) from Pearl Silberg’s handwritten recipe book, which I made handbound facsimile copies of some years back at the request of her daughter Rita. She was giving the books to her own children, Pearl’s grandkids. I couldn’t resist making myself a copy, too. Happy new year!

 

Sep 29 2016
10 Comments
Michaelmas

Angels Abound

the-bishops-wife

I wonder sometimes about the people who come into our lives just when you need them––the ones who drift in, do something good, then disappear. I am thinking right now of the random driver years ago who pulled in front of me on the road and slowed me down just long enough to protect me from the driver at the intersection ahead of us both who blew through a stop sign. Were it not for the slow guy suddenly in front of me, I would have been broadsided by that car that did not stop. So with thanks to that person I’ll never know, my fist-shaking and swearing became a sigh of relief. It does seem at times like I get through life with a measure of help from people just like this. What if it’s always the same person?

Today is Michaelmas (pronounced mick-il-mus). It is the Feast of Michael the Archangel, but angels abound in cultures throughout the world, we know this. And so it is fitting to celebrate not just Michael, but all angels, and various traditions will honor today Michael as well as Gabriel and Raphael. Others will include Uriel, Raguel, Ramiel, and Sariel. I love these names. Camael, Jophiel, and Zadkiel; Anael, Simiel, Oriphiel, and Raguel; Metatron, Israfil, and Malak al-Maut. Perhaps they are not all cherubim and seraphim, winged beings. Perhaps they are right here with us, looking just like us, driving cars when they need to and getting in our way, slowing us down when we need slowing down.

As for Michael the Archangel: He is the first of the archangels and the leader of the hosts of heaven. He likes heights: he is a protector of mountain tops and high places. He is, as well, a patron of cemeteries. His feast day comes with increasing night: we are a week past the equinox now and our nights in the Northern Hemisphere grow increasingly dark as we shave off a few minutes of daylight with each passing day. Darkness can be scary. It is a good time to call down the power of archangels for protection.

Struan Micheil, or Michaelmas bannocks, very much like scones, are typically made in Scotland on the Eve of Michaelmas (that would have been last night) from equal amounts of oat, rye, and barley flour. Tradition would have us make our Michaelmas bannocks without the use of metal: wooden fork, wooden or ceramic mixing bowl, stone for baking. Dinner might be roast goose, for Michaelmas coincides with the migration of geese. We call down the goose as we call down the angel. In some places, nuts are roasted and cracked for Michaelmas (a tradition that is part of many celebrations during these days of harvest).

It is the humble blackberry that is the center of the culinary traditions of Michaelmas, and we would do well to have our Michaelmas bannocks with fresh blackberries or with blackberry jam. The story goes that Satan, after his battle with Michael the Archangel, fell to earth from heaven and landed in a bramble patch, and each year on Michaelmas, Satan returns to curse and spit upon the brambles that he landed upon. And so we eat them up before this happens. Many folks will refuse to harvest blackberries after the 29th of September. It’s just not worth it; they could be cursed.

Last year for Michaelmas I gave you a song and I think I will leave you with that same song again this year, for it is perhaps the best song you’ll find to honor and invoke angels. It’s called “Calling All Angels” and it’s by Jane Siberry, a song she wrote and recorded as a duet with k.d. lang for the 1993 Siberry album When I Was a Boy. And so here, for you for Michaelmas, are two of my favorite Canadians singing the song live in Houston. It’s a homemade video, filmed by someone who was there in the audience that night, and in the very last few frames of the video, a woman in the audience turns to the camera and it is in those last few seconds that we witness the emotional power of a song, of a poem. This is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Connexions across time and space, whether human or angelic. Do we protect others? Bring out their best qualities? Are we each others’ guardian angels? Do we create heaven on earth? Do we choose to turn coal into diamonds? Believe what you will about angels. These daily decisions are ours to make.

 

Image: “Have a chair.” “Thank you, I have one.” Sometimes our guardian angels slow us down with newly-varnished chairs. In the 1947 film The Bishop’s Wife, David Niven plays a bishop who prays for help and receives it in the form of an angel played by Cary Grant. Seth and I watch it every year at Christmastime.

 

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