Nov 01 2014
2 Comments
Book of Days Calendar

Your November Book of Days

Nov14

A cold front came through yesterday afternoon, just before the Hallowe’en festivities began, and today it is autumnal perfection outside, Florida style. It’s cool, clear, breezy: a wonderful way to welcome November. We are expecting record lows tonight in Lake Worth, down into the 40s. For the Celts, this time of year was known as Samhain and it marked the beginning of winter and of a new year. Our cold front, it would seem, knows a thing or two about good timing.

People love to hate November. British poet Thomas Hood had this much to say about November:

No sun – no moon!
No morn – no noon ––
No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member ––
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds ––
November!

Of course it was 1844 and our poet was writing in a smoggy, cold London. Here in Lake Worth, November brings sunlight in a very particular slant that streams through the windows onto the oak floor and into the print shop and makes Haden, our shop cat, positively drunk on the stuff. She basks in that sunlight, sprawled out to soak in as much of it as she can, and if you go up to her and speak her name or snuzzle your nose into her ears, she looks back at you in a stupor. Haden will tell you: November here is pretty amazing.

To celebrate this wonderful month, we deliver to you today a gift: the November Book of Days calendar from Convivio Bookworks. It’s a printable PDF document so you can print it out and pin it to a bulletin board, should you wish.

You’ll find today is All Saints Day, All Hallows… the day that gives last night’s Halloween celebration its name, and tomorrow brings All Souls Day, or Dia de Muertos, Day of the Dead. What with all the traditional handmade Day of the Dead items we sell at our website, you know it’s a day we love. We’ll be celebrating with family tomorrow, eating pan de muertos and perhaps drinking bone punch, and I’ll include you in that festivity, too. So.. see you here at the Book of Days Blog tomorrow? Good.

 

 

Oct 31 2014
3 Comments
Halloween

This is Halloween

Lanterns

Tonight’s setting sun brings us Halloween. We celebrate all day, of course––folks in costume at work, parades of costumed children in elementary schools––but really it is the night that belongs to Halloween. The holiday’s name itself incorporates this fact, for the word Halloween is derived from its original monicker: All Hallow’s Eve, the eve of All Saints Day. Eventually, folks began calling the night Hallowe’en, with an apostrophe taking place of the V, and even the apostrophe fell out of favor eventually.

Not only is Halloween a good example of the fluid, living nature of language, it’s also a good example of the fluid, living nature of traditions in the seasonal round. Our celebrations have changed a lot over the centuries, but most everything about Halloween––from the costumes to the tricks or treats to the fascination with the macabre and death––takes us back to its original beginnings as Samhain, the Celtic celebration marking the passing of one year and the beginning of another, on this night. It was one of a few nights each year when the portals between worlds, be they worlds of the living and worlds of the dead, or worlds of mortals and worlds of fairies, were open and easily transgressible. A night charged with magic. And if you’ve been reading the Book of Days for a while now, you know how much we love to conjure magic through ceremony.

As you carve your jack o’lantern tonight and as you don your costume and as trick or treaters knock at your door, keep this distant and old magic in mind. The costumes and jack o’lanterns––which, by the way, were originally carved from turnips––were meant to keep evil spirits at bay; the giving of treats as offerings for the souls of those who had come and gone before us. The same and yet so removed from what we do today. And yet if there is magic to be found in crossing through time, there it is in traditions that are handed down from time immemorial.

I was up late last night putting the finishing touches on the annual Convivio Dispatch for Hallowe’en, which has become a bit of a tradition itself, and while I would not go as far as to put the Halloween Dispatch on par with Bailey White’s annual Thanksgiving story on NPR or Charles Dickens’s annual readings of A Christmas Carol, there are a whole bunch of people who seem to look forward to each Halloween’s special Convivio Dispatch from Lake Worth. If you didn’t receive it in your email inbox late last night, that means you are not subscribed for the Convivio Dispatch.

The Dispatches are separate and distinct from the Book of Days Blog; the Dispatches are more about story, and they are mostly about the quirky town I call home. And they come to you as a plain text email, like a little gift. The Dispatch has been like that for years and years and I like it that way: simple, no bells and whistles. If you don’t get the Convivio Dispatch and would like to, send me an email here at the bookworks: mail@conviviobookworks.com. I’ll see that you get last night’s story, as well as the ones that follow. There’s usually one each month; sometimes two. It’s never my goal to clutter your mailbox. As someone who is easily overwhelmed, I know better.

Thank you, and may your Hallowe’en be a spirited one. Keep the fires burning.
John

 

Image: Two jack o’lanterns on our porch one Hallowe’en night. I love Seth’s jack o’lanterns; they never have teeth.

 

 

Oct 21 2014
3 Comments
Apple Tuesday

Apple Tuesday

apple

If it’s the third Tuesday of October, then it’s Apple Tuesday, formerly known as National Apple Day, begun 110 years ago in 1904. What better time than now, the height of autumn, to honor something so simple yet so wonderful? Ralph Waldo Emerson called the apple our national fruit, and that’s pretty accurate, I’d say, beginning with the first apple plantings in the colonies and spreading throughout the country (thanks, Johnny Appleseed!) as settlers ventured further and further west across the continent.

The apple pictured here is the last of four apples that Seth’s sister gathered from the apple trees at his parents’ home in Maine before she came to visit a couple weeks back. Though she gathered four for us, she delivered only three, because she ate one on the flight down. That right there is the spell that apples cast upon us. The best apples, like this one, are crisp, tart, and sweet all at the same time, with an intoxicating aroma that sometimes makes them downright irresistible. We’re not sure what variety this apple is, but the Thompson homestead is an 1820s farm house, so who knows how old or what variety they are. All I know is this apple is here on my desk, and I plan on savouring every bite of it later today. It may not look perfect, but I know it will be amazing.

And I apologize for the brief absence. I had to finish my taxes last week, and there’s a reason why the words taxes and taxing are so similar. I sent my completed return off just in time last Wednesday with a hope and a prayer that my calculations are correct. Math and tax laws are both far removed from my list of strengths. Apples: I know apples pretty well. I’d prefer to stick to apples.

We’ve also been busy unpacking new items from the craft cooperative in Mexico that makes all those great handmade traditional crafts we offer for Dia de Muertos, Day of the Dead. Many of the new items are now posted at the Convivio Bookworks website and we’ll get the last of them loaded there this evening. Lots of new things we’re so excited about!

 

 

← Older posts
Newer posts →