Book of Days | from convivio bookworks

May 24 2014

The Problem with Memorial Day

It’s Memorial Day Weekend, unofficial beginning of summer here in the United States. These unofficial starts vary across nations and cultures. Up across the border in Canada, Victoria Day last week marked this cultural beginning of summer. And of course for those who follow the old traditions, we are well into summer by now, for the gentle season began with May Day at the start of the month. But here in the States, it is Memorial Day Weekend, the three day weekend, that really launches us into summer. Seasonal beach towns are changed overnight into bustling centers of activity. It’s a weekend for baseball games and boating and the firing-up of grills across this great land. Our focus shifts, rather dramatically, outward.

Memorial Day itself has an interesting history, and since the Book of Days is a blog that explores seasonal traditions, it’s one that we’ll delve into on the 30th of May, its traditional date. The problem with Memorial Day is that Congress, in its wisdom, created a three-day weekend out of the holiday back in 1968 when it passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. It sounds very bureaucratic and uninspired and the idea was that we would now celebrate certain national holidays as long weekends, as a matter of convenience. And it certainly is convenient, but it also has the unintended effect of watering down the importance of the actual holidays that are being celebrated. The result is that Memorial Day becomes a day––or a weekend––dominated by burgers and beer and traffic and commerce as we rush off to cookouts, beach homes, and appliance sales… all of which are as far removed from the day’s original intent as can be.

Memorial Day itself began as Decoration Day––a day to decorate the graves of those who had died in service to their country. As with most holidays of this nature, there is some ambiguity and uncertainty as to its true origins, with many communities claiming to originate Decoration Day practices, but all of these stories begin with the American Civil War. By the late 1860s, communities in both the South and the North began the practice of honoring those who had died in battle in the war with a Decoration Day holiday in early summer, and eventually the practice expanded to include those who had died in all American wars, rather than solely the Civil War.

Being the traditionalist that I am, I’m saving that discussion for Memorial Day’s proper date, May 30. My personal view is that it’s fine to celebrate the start of summer this weekend. Holidays do evolve and change and there’s no sense pretending this weekend is not a national welcoming of summer. So go on, enjoy the hot dogs, the burgers, the cole slaw, the s’mores. Even this is tradition, so embrace it, have a wonderful time. I think the 30th, though, is a fine time to remember the solemn beginnings of this national holiday. Congress may have given us a long weekend, but it’s up to each of us to do the memorializing.

The image above is one of my favorites: It’s the Cutrone family on a summer beach outing, probably at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, where Grandma had a bungalow. The little boy in the shorts with the sun in his eyes is my dad, and those are all my aunts and uncles before they were aunts and uncles, and my grandparents, circa 1930s.

May 13 2014

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Cold Sophie, The Ice Saints

Die Eisheiligen: The Ice Saints

If you need that heavy sweater once more, blame it on Sophie. May 15 is the day of Cold Sophie, a bit of old weather folklore from Northern Europe and especially Germany. Cold Sophie is usually winter’s last hurrah, sending a blast of cold icy air down from the North. Summer may be a-comin’ in, but Cold Sophie will remind you of winter’s power as she says farewell for a while with a kindly reminder: “I’ll be back. Don’t get too comfortable.”

Cold Sophie is Saint Sophia, and she is but one of a group of saints known in Germany as die Eisheiligen, or the Ice Saints. The Ice Saints are Saints Mamertus, Pancras, Servatius, Boniface, and Sophia, and their feast days begin on the 11th of May with St. Mamertus and continue on to St. Sophia on the 15th. It is a time of traditionally colder weather in Northern Europe, and anyone who planted their gardens ahead of Cold Sophie was thought to be a fool indeed, for Cold Sophie’s cold damp days would quickly do in all efforts of any and all overly-ambitious gardeners with a solid reminder of who is in charge. Cold Sophie returns each mid May to gently keep us in our place and help us keep in mind that all we do is in partnership with the planet and its elements.

So, considering saints all begin as everyday joes like you and me, who were these folks? St. Mamertus (May 11) was a fifth century bishop in France. His diocese was much afflicted by catastrophes, ranging from fires to earthquakes, and his regimen of fasting and prayer is thought to have delivered the region from its ill fate. St. Pancras (May 12) was a fourth century martyr of Rome, beheaded at the very young age of only 14 and so he is a patron saint of children. St. Servatius (May 13) is the patron saint of the city of Maastricht in the Netherlands, where he died as bishop in 384. His relics are kept there in the Basilica of St. Servatius in a gilded chest that is processed through the city once every seven years. St. Boniface of Tarsus (May 14) was a fourth century Roman martyr, a slave tossed into a cauldron of boiling tar. Boniface, however, was dropped from the calendar of saints for possibly not having actually existed. But it’s tough to keep a good legend down.

And finally we have St. Sophia herself (May 15), the ring leader of all the Ice Saints. Little is known of her life, but she, too, was a martyr of the early Christian movement in Rome. One of her attributes is a book, which, as a book artist myself, I rather like. She goes by many names: Cold Sophie in Germany and Poland, but amongst the Czechs she is known as Sophia the Ice Woman, and in Slovenia, Pissing Sophie. (I have no explanation, sorry. Any Slovenians care to chime in?)

The Ice Saints do not hold much sway here in Lake Worth. Once summer makes its presence known here, it tends to stay put and that is pretty much that, and we won’t be counting on another blast of cold weather until autumn returns, which is quite all right; this is as it should be. But if we should wake up on the 15th of May and find the temperature even just a few degrees cooler than normal, we can nod to the breeze and thank Cold Sophie.

Image: Four ice crystals photographed by William “Snowflake” Bentley in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bentley was a Vermont photographer who captured thousands of snowflakes on film. Still, he lamented missing the billions of snowflakes he never got to photograph.

May 10 2014

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Mother's Day

Mother’s Day

I love finding the disjunction in things: you know, what is it about something, anything, that is not quite right? It is often finding the disjunction that leads to really understanding a great painting, for instance, or offers some new insight into a poem or a story. And this may be at the heart of what I love about seasonal celebrations, because they are chock full of disjunction, mostly coming out of a church appropriating an old pagan holiday while the people cling stubbornly to their old ways, even centuries later.

But here we are with Mother’s Day, a benign enough holiday to be sure, a secular one, created only one century ago. In fact, this year marks the official 100th anniversary of Mother’s Day in this country. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson designated the Second Sunday of May as an official holiday recognizing our mothers. Behind Woodrow Wilson’s action was Anna Jarvis, a West Virginia woman whose life was consumed by Mother’s Day. Anna Jarvis championed the establishment and recognition of the holiday with great passion. But once the day was out of the box, as it were, it took on a life of its own. By 1920, Mother’s Day was already far too commercial for Anna, and she spent the rest of her life militantly fighting that commercialism. So, what do you do with a problem like Anna Jarvis?

Mother’s Day has its roots in the 1850s when Jarvis’s mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, organized women’s groups to aid in the Civil War, on both sides, both Union and Confederate. She called them Mother’s Day Work Clubs. After Ann’s passing in 1905, her daughter Anna sought to memorialize her mother with the idea that each person would honor their own mother, too. She did this in Philadelphia on May 10, 1908. She was living there in Philadelphia, but Mother’s Day was also observed that year at a little church in Grafton, West Virginia, where Anna was raised, that same day. Anna began making the observance of Mother’s Day her life’s work, and she was a great success at it. It took only six years more before Mother’s Day was being celebrated nationally.

But Anna soon came to despise her creation. Florists, candy shops, and a burgeoning greeting card industry were all quick to jump on the Mother’s Day bandwagon, and nothing irritated Anna Jarvis more. In her eyes, Mother’s Day was a day to go home and spend with your mom. Plain and simple. Anything more than that was sacrilege and she grew more and more adamant about this as the years progressed. She organized boycotts and public demonstrations and she was even arrested once or twice for disturbing the peace after crashing trade shows touting Mother’s Day gifts. Anna fought the commercialization of Mother’s Day with every last penny of her rather large inheritance, and she died broke and probably insane in 1948 at a Philadelphia sanitarium. One can picture her last words, as she struggled for air, being something about Mother’s Day. It’s a safe bet, I’d say, that they were.

I used to work for Hallmark, back when my heart was two sizes too small, and the fact is that Mother’s Day sales account for more greeting cards sold than any other holiday save Christmas and Valentine’s Day. It is one of the more impossible days to get a good table at a restaurant. Does your mother expect these things? I don’t know. If your mother is like my mother, she is probably saying, “Please, no gifts. I have enough stuff. Just come spend the day with me.” Certainly we all have enough stuff. Why burden your mother with more? All that Anna Jarvis (and most likely your mother, too) asks is that you go pay your mother a visit. Anna will smile upon you if you do, and so will your mother.

Image: That’s me and my mom, waiting patiently for something good… And in the next frame a birthday cake appears before us. It was my second birthday.