Category Archives: Advent

Nov 19 2021
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Advent, Stir-Up Sunday

Stirring Up a Slow Christmas

This Sunday brings a day known as Stir-Up Sunday: it’s the final Sunday of the year in Ordinary Time as we shift into the Advent season with the First Sunday of Advent on the 28th of November. It is, in my view, a good time to slow down and refocus on the approach to Christmas. I know people who have had full on Christmas decorations up for two weeks already, and while folks can do what they want, of course, well… that’s not happening in this house. We only put the Indian corn on the front door after Halloween ended, and there are still pumpkins on the porch. We’ll be taking each day this season as it comes (as we always do): Thanksgiving, then Advent, and a gradual easing into Christmas––so we’re not tired of it before the Christmas season has had its proper Twelve Days.

If you, too, are on board with this idea, then welcome! I call it the Slow Christmas Movement. It’s not for everyone, I know, but it’s the way we like to do things, and it heightens the Christmas experience by building on anticipation, which is such a wonderful thing.

Speaking of anticipation: it is a good time right now to order Advent candles and calendars from our Convivio Book of Days Catalog! A simple thing like an Advent candle that you light each night or an Advent calendar that you open a door on each day can really help bring some perspective to things, especially if you feel rushed. Ours are the traditional kinds, made in Europe, where these traditions began, and it’s all part of this Slow Christmas Movement. We always offer free domestic shipping when you spend $60, and this year, we are once again offering our big Christmas Stock-Up Sale: spend $75 on anything and everything in our catalog, and save $10 plus get free domestic shipping: a total savings of $19.50. Just use discount code STREETFAIR at checkout. Click here to shop!

Here’s another way to slow things down: this Sunday, prepare a traditional English fruitcake or steamed pudding. Not that you’ll be rushing the season by eating it this Sunday. No, the best of these desserts need time to age and time, if you are making them boozy, to soak up the booze. And this is what Stir-Up Sunday is all about. It begins with a prayer, and here it is:

Stir up, we beseech thee, o Lord, the wills of thy faithful people;
that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works,
may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Or something to that effect. The language is often updated nowadays, replacing the thees and the plenteouslies with more contemporary words, but I think you get the general idea. It is the collect––the prayer––after communion in the Anglican Church this last Sunday in ordinary time before we shift to those Four Sundays of Advent, the time when we make our houses as fair as we are able. There is the prayer, and there is also the fact that traditional steamed puddings and fruitcakes require a good four weeks to age and become sufficiently brandy-soaked to reach their best depth of flavor. Ask folks in the congregation and they may very well have their own version of the collect, which goes more along these lines:

Stir up, we beseech thee, the pudding in the pot,
Stir up, we beseech thee, and keep it all hot.

This is not something we are particularly aware of in my family, Catholics as we are, and Italians, no less. But my sister does make a good fruitcake most Christmases, brandy-soaked like the best of them, and she does make it early, long before Christmas’s arrival. Same goes for her delicious Pfeffernüsse, the spicy German cookie that requires weeks to develop its flavors. They say a proper British Christmas pudding should contain thirteen ingredients––one for Jesus and each of his disciples––no more and no less. And when it is prepared on Stir-Up Sunday, each member of the family should give the pudding a stir, making a wish as they do. The stirring must be from east to west: the same direction the Magi traveled to visit the newborn child.

By the way, here is Nigella Lawson’s recipe for her Ultimate Christmas Pudding. I think we may give this a try in our home this year. You’ll find two versions presented there: one in metric measures and one in imperial measures. The two versions have more differences than just ways of measuring ingredients: The metric includes the British name for raisins (the lovely word sultanas), but it also lists suet as an ingredient, where in the American version, the suet is replaced by vegetable shortening. I’ll be making this using the shortening.

COME SEE US!
If you’re far away, don’t forget our Christmas Stock-Up Sale. But we’ll be popping up at a few nearby pop-up markets this season, and if you’re local, we’d love to see you. We’ll be outdoors at all these markets.

HOLIDAY MARKET at MATTHEWS BREWING CO.
Sunday November 28 from 2 to 8 PM at 130 South H Street in Lake Worth Beach. We’ll have a table in the outdoor courtyard, focused on Advent candles, Advent calendars, and a selection of Christmas artisan goods from Germany, Sweden, and Mexico.

HOLIDAY NIGHT MARKET & FESTIVAL at SOCIAL HOUSE
Saturday December 4 starting at 6 PM at 512 Lucerne Avenue in Downtown Lake Worth Beach. Inspired by traditional European Christmas markets. We’ll have a tent in the outdoor courtyard with a large selection of our Advent and Christmas artisan goods from Germany, Sweden, and Mexico, Shaker culinary herbs and herbal teas, and some of our textiles from Kei & Molly Designs and Millie’s Tea Towels.

CHRISTKINDLMARKT at the AMERICAN GERMAN CLUB
Saturday December 11 from 2 to 10 PM and Sunday December 12 from Noon to 8 PM at 5111 Lantana Road in suburban Lake Worth. A traditional German Christmas market. Tickets required. Our largest pop-up shop ever will include Advent candles and calendars, Christmas artisan goods from Germany, Sweden, and Mexico, Shaker culinary herbs and herbal teas and soaps, Millie’s Tea Towels, our new line of tea towels and reusable bags from Kei & Molly Designs, market bags from Mexico, and more.

One last thing before I sign off: Won’t you join me, virtually, at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts’ next virtual Real Mail Fridays social? It’s today! Friday November 19 from 2 to 5 Eastern. We’re calling this one the ABBA Voyage Social Redux, because yes, we did it last week and it was SUCH a blast, we’re doing it one more time. Three hours of ABBA music––classics and new music from ABBA’s just released new album: their first in nearly 40 years. Click here for the Zoom link to join in the social. Come and go as you please. Supremely heartwarming. And you know I’d love to see you.

Image at top: “The Christmas Pudding” by Robert Seymour. Etching for The Book of Christmas by Thomas K. Hervey, 1836.

 

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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.

 

Dec 12 2020
4 Comments
Advent, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Santa Lucia, The Gift Bearers

Sacred Candlelight

Such a sacred act, lighting a candle. That concentrated energy in the spark of the wooden match striking the flint, a small explosion of illumination, lighting the wick that burns the tallow. Like many things of wonder, it is an act that is potentially dangerous, and yet, kept in control, a thing of extreme beauty. So many of our sacred nights here at our home are illuminated by candlelight. (Perhaps they all are sacred: for months now, since this time of isolation began, Seth has been lighting candles at the dinner table each night.)

As I write this today, it is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and in the overnight hours as this day becomes the next, Sankta Lucia will arrive, too, with a wreath of candles upon her head, illuminating the dark cold night, this night that “walks with heavy steps.” I can picture all of the glass Guadalupe candles that are so ubiquitous in shops here in Lake Worth––from Botanica shops to the grocery store aisles––illuminated, too. Some folks are lighting Chanukah candles, and on the Advent wreath this Sunday, we illuminate two purples candles and the rose candle, too, for it is Gaudete Sunday, the Sunday of Advent where we add a measure of joy to our time of reflection. It is difficult to contain the joy that we know is coming with Christmas, and so the colors for this next week of Advent take on the joyful color of rosy pink, rather than somber purple.

And so here we are, practically midway through December already. The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on the 12th of December is sacred to all the countries of Latin America, but most especially to Mexico. As the story goes, in 1531, a fellow named Juan Diego was on a hill near Mexico City and there he saw an apparition of a woman. She asked him to build a church in her honor there on the hill. She spoke to him in his native Nahuatl language and he recognized her, by the things she told him, as the Virgin Mary. And it was on 12th of December in that year that the iconic image of Our Lady of Guadalupe that we know so well miraculously appeared inside Juan Diego’s cloak: on one of his visits to the hill, Mary told Juan Diego to go to the barren top of the hill, but when he got there, he found it not at all barren but covered with roses, all in bloom. He and Mary gathered the roses and she arranged them inside his cloak. And on this, her feast day, Juan Diego opened his cloak before the bishop of Mexico City. When he did, the flowers all fell to the floor, revealing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The bishop took it as a sign. The church was built, and the image from Juan Diego’s cloak, or tilma, hangs still inside the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Tepeyac Hill, Mexico City.

The 13th, a Sunday this year, brings St. Lucy’s Day: the Feast of Santa Lucia in Italy (where Lucia is pronounced loo-chee-a) and Sankta Lucia in Sweden (where the C is soft: loo-see-a). Lucia is sacred to both countries; she was born and lived and died in Sicily, but––perhaps because the nights are so dark in Sweden in December––she was long ago taken up there and celebrated. Lucia = Light, and light is a precious commodity to come by near the Arctic Circle around this time of the approaching Midwinter Solstice.

In Italy, children will wake up in the morning to find tiny presents tied to their shoelaces, as long as they’ve left hay and carrots in their shoes before they went to bed, for Santa Lucia’s donkey. Santa Lucia follows St. Nicholas as the next of the Midwinter gift bearers. In Sweden, typically there are processions on this night in celebration of Sankta Lucia: in churches, in schools, in city streets, on national television. Each features a Lucia, donning a wreath of glowing candles upon her head, with scores of her attendants: boys and girls dressed all in white, each bearing a candle, and then the Star Boys, each carrying stars on poles and donning tall white conical caps. It is one of the most beautiful sights of these ever-darkening nights on the approach to the solstice. In homes, too, Lucia will come in the early morning darkness, wreath glowing upon her head, delivering strong coffee and saffron scented buns, lussekatter, to all in the household.

It is a time that gets jumbled up in our home (and perhaps many other places, too) with things both Italian and Swedish. Even the music for this night is jumbled, for the song that is sung throughout Sweden this night (click here to listen) is Italian in origin, an old Neapolitan melody, transformed and rewritten for a place where, at this darkest time of the year, the night is vast:

The night walks with heavy steps around farm and cottage.
Around the earth, forsaken by the sun, shadows are lowering.
Then into our dark house she treads with lighted candles,
Sankta Lucia, Sankta Lucia.

The night is vast and mute. Now here reverberate
in all silent rooms a rustle as of wings.
See, on our threshold stands––whiteclad, lights in her hair––
Sankta Lucia, Sankta Lucia.

“The darkness will soon take flight from the valleys of earth.”
Thus she a wonderful word to us speaks.
The day shall again, reborn, rise from a rosy sky,
Sankta Lucia, Sankta Lucia.

On Sunday morning, my sister will make her Santa Lucia wreath––a sweet yeast bread, braided and round, a never ending circle like the circle of days, dotted with candied cherries and illuminated with four red candles. Another simple yet delicious treat we have but once each year, and we’ll enjoy it tonight with coffee after dinner. This is our Santa Lucia way.

All of us here––my mom, my sister, Seth and me––we wish you light and peace on these sacred illuminated midwinter nights.

Image: My sister Marietta’s Santa Lucia Bread. I wish we could pour you some coffee and cut a slice for you!

 

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