Category Archives: Yule

Dec 26 2023
2 Comments
Christmas, St. John's Day, St. Stephen's Day, Twelve Days of Christmas, Yule

First Two Days of Christmas

Advent has run its course, Christmas has been made welcome, and now we enter into the Christmas season proper. When we sing the old carol about five golden rings and a partridge in a pear tree and all those other gifts that my true love gave to me, this is what we are singing about: The Twelve Days of Christmas begin now, now that Christmas Eve and Christmas Day have passed.

There are two approaches to the calculation of these Twelve Days: One approach has the Twelve Days of Christmas beginning on Christmas Day itself, while the other starts them on St. Stephen’s Day, the 26th of December. In this house, we subscribe to the second approach. Our ancestors, who perhaps were more attuned than we to the passing of the days and to each day’s meaning, loved symmetry in numbers, and the second approach provides exactly that. Christmas Day itself has long been seen as a day outside ordinary time: a most distinct and holy day, followed by a beautiful symmetry that comes along with the passing of the year. In this model, we have six days of Christmas in the old year and six days in the new, creating a balanced bridge at the start and end of each year, a balance that links the other old story –– that of the ever expanding round of the year as this old earth spins on its axis and rotates around the sun –– to the story of the child’s birth at Bethlehem. The links connect Christmas through the years in a lovely balance. More mystery, of the universal sort, heavenly yet here on earth.

If you feel let down when Christmas Day has passed, join us on our journey and you won’t have any reason to feel this way, and I do hope you’ll join us at your home in celebrating the full season that lasts through Epiphany on the Sixth of January. And if you are a bit in love with Christmas as we are in this household, welcome. Our Christmas tree and other greenery will be illuminated tonight and every night through Epiphany, and most likely we will go even beyond, for traditionally the greenery would come down at Candlemas Eve: the First of February. Keeping it up longer would invite goblins into your home, and no one wants that. But to bring light and cheer through all the dark month of January is, I think, a wonderful thing.

My plan this year for the Twelve Days of Christmas is to write a few Book of Days chapters, grouping together the days of Christmas that seem fittingly grouped, and in this chapter, we’ll discuss the first Two Days of Christmas. Before we begin, I’ve got a worthy suggestion: there are a few farm stand and pantry items you may find handy to stock up on for this season. My recommendations: apples, chestnuts, mulling spices, honey, red wine, fresh cider, and rose water. We can supply your mulling spices and rose water; ours are both made by the Sabbathday Lake Shakers and we’ll ship via US Priority Mail to get your domestic order to you in just two or three days.

And now to begin our journey: It begins, of course, with Christmas Day, December 25, a day outside ordinary time. In our model, Christmas Day stands alone in its holiness, a holyday/holiday if ever there was one. But December 26 brings St. Stephen’s Day and the First Day of Christmas:

FIRST DAY of CHRISTMAS
December 26
St. Stephen’s Day, Boxing Day, Day of the Wren, First Day of Kwanzaa

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 this 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, this Giorno di Santo Stefano is a big deal. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day is for family, but St. Stephen’s Day 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 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. Nowadays, the wrens paraded around town are effigies, and not real wrens (all is forgiven, wrens!).

The 26th also brings the start of a newer tradition, the First Day of Kwanzaa, which brings yet more light to the world through candles and a celebration of African-American culture: each candle and each day, through the First of January, 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).

SECOND DAY OF CHRISTMAS
December 27
St. John’s Day

On St. John’s Day we remember St. John the Evangelist, one of the Twelve Apostles and the only one who did not die a martyr’s death for his beliefs, although many attempts were made on his life. In the most famous of these, St. John was sentenced to die by ingesting poisoned wine. John drank the wine but the poison had no effect on him. And so it is customary on this Second Day of Christmas to give gifts of wine, as well as to bring bottles of wine to church to be blessed, especially in Germany and Austria. This blessed St. John’s wine is thought to have healing properties and to taste better than other wines. Some even hold that wine that is not blessed but is stored nearby to blessed St. John’s wine improves in flavor just by being near it. It is a fine night (as are most nights during Christmastide) to enjoy mulled wine and roasted chestnuts… and here is our recipe for mulled wine, one of the loveliest drinks of the Yuletide season (indeed, all winter long):

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 or enamel pot and set it on the stove over medium heat. Add about a teaspoon of mulling spices for each serving. 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).

I’ll be back with our next chapter on the Third Day of Christmas: Childremas, or Holy Innocents’ Day… it is a day in the Twelve when the story takes a dark turn, acknowledging the sorrows in life. For now, though: Cheers!

TWELVE DAYS of CHRISTMAS SALE
At our online shop, our Twelve Days of Christmas Sale brings you automatic markdowns on most of our authentic German handmade nutcrackers, pyramids, and incense smokers. We are running the sale for the full Twelve Days of Christmas, through the Sixth Day of January. If there are things you wanted that Santa couldn’t fit in his sleigh, well, we’re here to help (and to offer you our best prices of the year, too). CLICK HERE to shop!

 

Image: “Provando o Vinho” (“Tasting the Wine”) by an unknown artist working in the English School, Portugal. Oil painting, 19th century. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

Dec 21 2023
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Midwinter, Solstice, Yule

Snow on Snow on Snow

If you read as many 19th and early 20th Century books as I do, you may come to the same conclusion as I have about the weather: Christmas was definitely colder and snowier back then. Washington Irving’s traveler in the Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Ebenezer Scrooge and the ghosts that visit him in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Dick Dewey and the full cast of characters of Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, Dylan Thomas’ child in A Child’s Christmas in Wales: all of these characters experience frosty, snow blown Christmases, the likes of which we rarely see these days, or so it seems to me. But what do I know? I live in Florida. It was 1977 when it last snowed here in Lake Worth. Our niece, who lives nearby, is bound for Maine to spend Christmas with her grandparents and she was hoping for snow, but instead the forecast there is calling for unseasonably warm temperatures. Where’s the fun in that, especially when it is Christmas?

Even here in this strange green land, cold is part of what we long for in Christmas, part of what makes Christmas, well, Christmas. We celebrate Christ’s Mass––Christmas––around the time of the Northern Hemisphere’s Midwinter solstice, but, in fact, we don’t really know when Jesus was born. It was the early Church, working within the confines of the Wheel of the Year, that placed his holy birth at the Midwinter Solstice. To the Midsummer Solstice, the Church assigned the birth of his cousin, St. John the Baptist. And so John is born at the brightest time of the year, just a few days past June’s solstice, the time of our longest days. But with Midsummer’s passing, the days already begin to grow shorter, and John himself tells us this: “I must decrease so he may increase.” John prepares the way for Jesus, the Light of the World. Which is why we celebrate the birth of Christ now, at the opposite pole of the year, the time of our darkest, longest nights, just as daily sunlight is at its minimum and is again about to increase. It is the old, old story, a rich and beautiful metaphor, attached to the even older story of the rhythm of our planet as it circles around the sun each year, tilted as it is on its axis, the tilt creating the seasons that are the basis of all our celebrations in the Wheel of the Year. Each day different from the one before and the one after: the constant rearrange that takes us from winter to spring to summer to fall and to winter again. It is the story we all know. And here we go again: In this bleak midwinter, light is born, the child is born, and now light again begins to increase. By Candlemas on the Second of February, when the Christmas season officially ends and when St. Brigid invites us to take our first steps upon her bridge to springtime, we will already be halfway between the Midwinter solstice and the Vernal equinox. There is nothing random about the days we celebrate. There is purpose and meaning behind them, as we tell the story over and over again: this story that never grows old. It is always fascinating. Always amazing.

As precision goes, the solstice moment this time around (more or less, for there are variations east and west within time zones), is 10:27 PM here in US Eastern Standard Time. That is the moment when the sun’s rays strike their southernmost point at the Tropic of Capricorn, south of the Equator, and in the Southern Hemisphere, today brings the Midsummer solstice and the longest day. Polar opposites: their longest day, our longest night.

Here at our home in Lake Worth, we’ll mark this longest night by lighting a fire in the backyard copper fire bowl. Our Midwinter fire will be fueled by the remnants of last year’s Christmas tree, which has been drying in a quiet corner of the yard since we brought it out there last February at Candlemas. A quiet ceremony on a chilly night in which the embers in our fire glow and shimmer and share the same winter sky as the stars that twinkle above.

 

SPECIALTY FOODS SALE
You’ll find savings right now on European Christmas cookies and candies (and more) in the Specialty Foods section of our online shop (CLICK HERE to SHOP). The markdowns are automatic, and you can also take an additional $10 off your order of $85 when you use discount code SLOWCHRISTMAS at check out, and we’ll pay your domestic shipping at that level, too. (Our flat rate shipping fee is $9.50 for all domestic orders below $85.) While your order won’t be delivered by Christmas Day at this point, you’ll certainly have your order in time to enjoy for the Twelve Days of Christmas, though, which begin only once Christmas Day itself has passed. Aside from the cookies and chocolates in our shop, there are some important pantry items to have on hand to make your Twelve Days as wonderful as possible: I’d suggest stocking up on chestnuts at your local Italian market to enjoy throughout the Christmas season, and from us, may I suggest Shaker Mulling Spices so you can make mulled wine and Shaker Rose Water so you can make baklava and our Three Kings Cake come Epiphany.

 

Image: Bernstorffsvejen ved Rygaard, Rimfuld Vintermorgen (The Road Bernstorffsvej at Rygaard on a Frosty Winter Morning) by Christian Zacho. Oil on canvas, 1905 [Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons].

 

Jan 30 2023
2 Comments
Candlemas, Christmas, Imbolc, St. Brigid's Day, Yule

Perspective Shift

We are on the approach this week to St. Brigid’s Day and Candlemas and these days represent a distinct shift in perspective in the Wheel of the Year: a shift toward spring, a shift away from Yule and Christmas and the celebrations of Midwinter that we have enjoyed for nearly 40 days now. It is, mind you, most definitely a perspective shift and not an experience shift: there is no denying the lengthening days here in the Northern Hemisphere, but we know winter is not done with us, not by a long shot. Be that as it may, with the arrival of February, we take our first step onto the bridge that leads us from winter to spring.

Lia Leendertz, in her Almanac for this year, relates a Scottish folktale about this phenomenon in her chapter for the month of February. In this tale, Beira, Goddess of Winter, has a magic staff in her possession and frost covers the land whenever she bangs the staff hard on the ground. In her icy kingdom, Beira holds a young woman called Brigid captive, and one day, Beira sends Brigid on an impossible errand: she gives Brigid a brown cloak and instructs her to wash it clean in the nearby icy stream and bring it back pure white. Brigid despairs. But Father Winter watches over her, and at the icy stream he turns the cloak white and presents Brigid, too, with a bouquet of lovely snowdrops. Brigid brings both these things to Beira, but Beira is outraged: the snowdrops are a sign –– a sign that her power is waning, and so she sets off in a huff across the land, banging her staff, bringing frost and snowfall wherever she roams.

The Goddess of Winter can’t hold on forever, though. The first day of February brings St. Brigid’s Day. Brigid, that same young woman charged with washing the brown cloak white, is our bridge from winter to spring. Her day is one of the four cross quarter days in the year; each is marked by accompanying holydays/holidays. The one we most recently celebrated was at the end of October and start of November: Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day –– the Days of the Dead. We were approaching winter; life was descending below the earth. But as February begins, this next period of cross quarter days mark the first stirrings of earth’s awakening on the approach to spring. The snowdrops are a sign of this; hence Beira’s outrage.

St. Brigid is sacred to Ireland and second in stature there only to St. Patrick. In the older earthbound religions, the First of February honors the Celtic goddess Brigid and brings the season of Imbolc. As the goddess goes, the old crone of winter is reborn now as the young maiden, for this is a time of renewal. The seeds that were planted beneath the earth last fall are preparing to bring forth lush green life, once spring truly arrives. For St. Brigid’s Day, it is traditional to fashion a St. Brigid’s Cross out of rushes or reeds (pictured in the stained glass window above), as well as to leave an oat cake and butter on a windowsill in your home. This, to encourage Brigid to visit your home and bless all who live there. Brigid is typically depicted holding her cross of rushes in one hand and an illuminated lamp in the other––bridging, again, the themes of light in the darkness of midwinter with the green of approaching spring.

Once the sun sets on St. Brigid’s Day, we enter into Candlemas Eve, and if you––like Seth and me in this house––have been delighting in Christmas all this month, now comes the time to put yuletide behind us. On the night of the First of February we will remove all yuletide greenery from our home as we return to nature what is hers. The cedar garland on the front door will come down, and the Christmas tree, which has brought such peaceful illumination to our home since just a few days before Christmas, will be carried outside and set to rest in a quiet corner of the yard. With Candlemas Eve, forty days will have passed since the Midwinter solstice and we find ourselves halfway from the solstice to the vernal equinox in March. Our old reliable 17th century Book of Days poet Robert Herrick describes the significance of this night in his poem “Ceremony Upon Candlemas Eve” as he provides the following instructions:

Down with the rosemary, and so
Down with the bays and misletoe;
Down with the holly, ivy, all,
Wherewith ye dress’d the Christmas Hall:
That so the superstitious find
No one least branch there left behind:
For look, how many leaves there be
Neglected, there (maids, trust to me)
So many goblins you shall see.

When the nights grow long again next December, that old tree will fuel our solstice fire, connecting one Christmas to the next. With Christmas removed (and goblins and ill luck kept at bay), our perspective shift will bring us on the Second of February to Candlemas, a beautiful celebration in its own rite, and the second step on the bridge to spring that Brigid lays before us. Candlemas is the day that candles are blessed in the church, but it is also known as Purification Day, which harkens back to an old Hebrew tradition: forty days after the birth of a son, women would go to the temple to be purified. Again, renewal. And so Mary did this, for it was her tradition, and when she did, it was there at the temple that she and her infant child ran into the elders Simeon and Anna, who recognized the child as “the Light of the World.” This is the basis for the blessing of candles on this day, and the day’s lovely name, which is even more beautiful in other languages: la Candelaria in Spanish, la Chandeleur in French. In France, the traditional evening meal for la Chandeleur is crêpes. In Mexico, la Candelaria is a night for tamales and hot chocolate, while the procession and celebration in Puno, Peru, is typically so big, it rivals that of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. And while the First of February is the night that all remaining Yuletide greenery is removed from the home, traditional custom would have us keep nativity scenes up through Candlemas, the Second of February.

One of my favorite Candlemas traditions is to go through the house at sunset, lighting every lamp, even for just a few minutes. And my favorite song for the day is an old carol called “Jesus, the Light of the World.” Is it a carol for Candlemas? Who knows. Certainly the words echo those of Simeon and Anna, the elders in the temple, so for me, I say it is.

Most famously, perhaps, Candlemas is known as an old weather marker. As the old saying goes: If the sun shines bright on Candlemas day / The half of the winter’s not yet away. The tradition of Candlemas as weather marker is particularly strong in Germany. And while Candlemas itself is not celebrated with any great gusto here in the States, this remnant of tradition remains in our yearly observation on the Second of February of Groundhog Day, in which the observations of an old groundhog in Pennsylvania (where many Germans settled) determine how much longer winter will last. Did old Candlemas weather lore influence the traditions that revolve around Punxsutawney Phil? Of this we can be pretty certain.

 

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Image: Detail of the left light of the stained glass window in the north wall of the north transept of the Church of the Most Holy Rosary, Tullow, County Carlow, Ireland. The window was created by George Walsh (b. 1939), depicting the pavilion in the garden of the Brigidine Sisters in Tullow and St. Brigid’s Cross. Photo by Andreas F. Borchert, via Wikimedia Commons, 2013.

 

 

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