Category Archives: Ramadan

Apr 05 2023
4 Comments
Book of Days Calendar, Holy Week, Passover, Ramadan, Spring

Spring Green, or Your April Book of Days

And here now is your belated Convivio Book of Days calendar for April. Cover star: “Beech Trees in Springtime,” an 1897 oil painting by Christian Zacho. It is filled with the ephemeral spring green of newly leafed trees, which, if you are lucky, you will be seeing a fair amount of in the coming weeks, as spring comes into its own. An annual bit of wonder and renewal. We see it even here, in this strange green land, in an albeit subtle way: passing by a stand of bald cypress, for instance, as we drive across the state on Alligator Alley. It is a fine time to take a drive or to take a walk and see something new and fresh and green.

We find ourselves, too, in the midst of an important week, across cultures and spiritual traditions: Ramadan continues and at sundown tonight, Passover begins. And it is Holy Week, a week of complexity and mystery in which the forty days of Lent, which we’ve been immersed in since Ash Wednesday, will come to a close. It began last Sunday with Palm Sunday. Thursday will bring Holy Thursday, or Maundy Thursday, when tradition would have us visit three churches in the moonlit night, Friday will bring Good Friday, when we commemorate the passion of Christ, and Saturday the vigil through which we wend our way toward Easter.

What I know about Ramadan is not much and what I know about Passover is perhaps just a bit more, and is mostly is in relation to my Catholic upbringing and to Passover’s connexion to the Easter story. I know that Passover commemorates the liberation of the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt, and I know what a friend told me once, which has always resonated with me about the holiday: “We are traveling through the desert with our ancestors via a table filled with metaphor and symbolism.” The meal is the seder, the same meal that Jesus celebrated with his disciples in the upper room on that Holy Thursday night before he died. Pesach is the Hebrew name for Passover, and Pesach informs the name for Easter in many languages. Hence our Italian word for the day and season: Pasqua. And while Ramadan roams the calendar, falling a few weeks earlier each year, Pesach, Pasqua, and a full- or near-full Paschal moon are all constant companions based on the timing of the spring equinox.

The Last Supper is the Passover meal in the upper room that is commemorated at the Mass for Holy Thursday. Each year, as Lent begins, I think to myself, “This is the year I’m going to do things right.” I imagine myself taking the time to give the forty days their proper space and time, to be more mindful, and give them more reverence. And each year those forty day zip by and I find myself here, at this junction where Lent runs headlong into Holy Week, and I realize I just have these few days left to make things right. Holy Thursday is my night to do this. I drag Seth along with me, if he has it in him, on a Holy Thursday pilgrimage that my grandmother taught me: as the rest of the world is contemplating sleep, we will head out into the night and visit three churches. The churches that know Grandma’s ways will keep their doors open late into the night, or even throughout the night until morning. The moon is our companion through this pilgrimage, along with a few other hearty souls who visit the churches with us. The churches will be dim but warm with candle glow and quiet and the presence, to me at least, of all the loved ones I bring with me in my heart. I sit, I kneel, I pray, I ponder. It is a night like no other, the strongest bridge I know between realms. We each, of course, bring to it what we bring, but this is what my Holy Thursdays, my Maundy Thursdays, are like, and I feel truly at home in the mystery.

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IT MAY BE NOT TOO LATE to order things from our website for Easter. We ship US Priority Mail, which is two days to most domestic destinations, so chances are good you’ll have your order by Saturday. Locals, of course, we can deliver to you or you can come pick up at our front porch. It’s a little too warm these days to ship our German chocolates for Easter, but locals: I don’t know that there’s anywhere else nearby where you’ll find German milk chocolate bunnies and German marzipan bunnies. We have a few left of each. Plus Ukrainian pysanky, wooden bunnies and splint wood baskets and paper mache eggs from Germany, handmade egg-shaped candles from Sweden…. many Easter delights await you at Convivio Bookworks! CLICK HERE to shop. And use discount code BUNNY at checkout to get $10 off your purchase of $85 on all our offerings, plus free domestic shipping!

AND WON’T YOU JOIN ME this Friday, Good Friday, via Zoom for Real Mail Fridays? It’s a weekly online social I host for the Jaffe Center for Book Arts. Good Friday is an odd day for a social, I know, so the approach I’m planning is this: a more subdued soundtrack for the first two hours, and then we’ll devote the final hour of our gathering to a most sublime recording called “Lamentations: Holy Week in Provence.” It’s by the Boston Camerata. “Lamentations” is a most beautiful piece of music, and we will play it uninterrupted from 4:00 Eastern to the close of our online social. We do bill Real Mail Fridays as a letter writing social, but the folks who join us each week from around the globe do all kinds of interesting things during our time together. We’ll begin as we always do, at 2:00 Eastern. Come and go as you please but do consider joining us for “Lamentations” beginning at 4. No matter your faith tradition or your beliefs, it is a most special way to mark the day. CLICK HERE to join us Friday between 2 and 5 Eastern.

 

Image: “Beech Trees in Springtime” by Christian Zacho. Oil on canvas, 1897. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Apr 12 2021
Eid Al-Fitr, Ramadan

Under the Crescent Moon

Ramadan moves through the year, each year earlier and earlier, and this year it begins with the sighting of this month’s new crescent moon, which in most places is expected to be this evening, this 12th of April. It’s not so much that Ramadan moves around as that it always comes in the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, and the calendar, being a lunar one, operates differently from solar calendars. Ramadan was a summer holiday a few years ago, and now it is a spring holiday, and it won’t be long before it is a winter one… and sometimes Ramadan can come twice in a solar year, which will happen next in 2030, when it will be celebrated in January and again the following December.

Ah, but now it is spring and now comes Ramadan and with it, Muslims will fast during the daylight hours and eat and drink only when the sun is down, all through this month from one crescent moon sighting to the next. It is a time of reflection, a time of thankfulness, a time to gather with family, and a time, more so than other times of the year, for good deeds. Before the sun rises each day, many families will enjoy a big meal called suhoor, a meal meant to sustain through the day. (This is definitely not the time for a slice of buttered toast for a pre-dawn breakfast!) And once the sun sets again, the fast is broken with a sweet delectable date, followed by a meal called iftar.

With the sighting of the next crescent moon, this year in May, Ramadan will conclude with a big feast called Eid al-Fitr: the Sweet Festival. Our friend Manal Aman of Hello Holy Days! in Canada has for years been following her calling to make these holidays mainstream, something familiar to us all. She designs cards for Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr, and other products, too, like countdown calendars and gift bags. Her work is gorgeous, and, I think, so important in helping us build bridges rather than walls. We sell her cards at Convivio Bookworks and encourage you to have a look and if you know people who celebrate these holidays, join us in sending them greetings. In fact, this year, we are participating in Manal’s Great Big Eid Card Swap and we’ve been buddied-up with a pen pal in Jackson Heights, New York. I am putting our card in the post today. You’ve got a whole month––all the way until the next crescent moon––to do the same for your friends who are celebrating. And when you do, tell them, “Ramadan Mubarak!”

Shop our collection of Manal’s cards for this season of Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr by clicking here. And back in November, Manal interviewed me on Instagram TV for her series ahead of Small Business Saturday; we had a fun time chatting about the book arts, about my mom, about our Shaker Rose Water and my experience as a print intern at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community, and why it’s so important to us to carry Manal’s work in our shop. You can watch the 30-minute interview by clicking here.

 

Apr 27 2020
4 Comments
Ramadan, St. Mark's Eve, Transitions

Rounding Out April

April is soon coming to a close, and I apologize, I’ve definitely fallen off the ball with Book of Days updates since Easter. Since then, St. George’s Day has come and gone, as has the mysterious St. Mark’s Eve and his day, too, and hopefully the people of Venice were able to make risi e bisi, their traditional meal for the day, a risotto of rice and peas with pancetta and onion. I, for one, have been cooking up a storm (Sunday I made tomato sauce and a cardamom pear coffee cake) and one big question is once I switch back from trousers with drawstrings to trousers that have actual buttons and zippers, will I have to leave that top button open? The cat seems to like us being home, too; she now takes an additional meal at 2 in the afternoon.

Ramadan began this past week, too. A central aspect of this month-long celebration is daytime fasting. The fasting is a reminder of the many people who are less fortunate than ourselves, and in this strange time of home quarantine and isolation, it is good to remember this. It is so very easy to get caught up in our own troubles, no? Chances are extremely good that there is always someone having a much rougher day than we are. Why not then be kind and patient with everyone? This is a central aspect of Ramadan, but it should just as well be a central premise of living for us all.

Ramadan continues until the next crescent moon, when Eid al-Fitr, the Sweet Festival, begins. Beautiful Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr cards, all by our friend Manal Aman of Hello Holy Days! in Canada, are available at our online catalog, and right now they are all 15% off with code SPRING15 (through April 30). Other spring and summer items are included, as well as all of our handmade soaps. Plus free domestic shipping when you spend $50 across our catalog.

One last thing today: working from home has meant finding creative solutions to new challenges. One of my challenges as Director of the Jaffe Center for Book Arts at Florida Atlantic University Libraries is to maintain a connection with our students and our book arts enthusiasts, and so last month, despite my stage fright, I began a weekly Facebook Live broadcast called Book Arts 101: Home Edition, which airs live on the Facebook page of the Jaffe Center for Book Arts each Wednesday at 3 PM Eastern Daylight Time. We talk books and craft and stories and the broadcasts originate here, at the Convivio Bookworks studio. Basically, if it’s in my home or on the premises, it’s fair game. This Wednesday’s episode is going to be a love letter, of sorts, to Lake Worth, the quirky town we call home. I’ll be showing and talking about things in our home that were made in Lake Worth or that delve into its history. If you’re a fan of my Convivio Dispatches from Lake Worth, you’ll probably enjoy Wednesday’s broadcast. And if you’re not familiar with the Dispatches, you can check one out by clicking here. The Convivio Dispatch is quite a different animal than this blog. The Dispatches are more based in story, and they are not collected in a blog, but rather come to you as a very occasional email, as they always have.

Anyway, won’t you join us on Wednesday? If you can’t make it at 3 Eastern, worry not, the videos are later available at the Convivio Bookworks Facebook page. There have been four so far, and we’ll continue them for as long as they feel needed.

 

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