Jan 20 2024
2 Comments
St. Agnes Eve

Agnes Sweet & Agnes Fair

Last March, we lost a wonderful writer called Helen Barolini. I never knew of her work until I accidentally stumbled upon one of her books, Festa: Recipes and Recollections of Italian Holidays (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988) at a library book sale. I was drawn immediately to the title and the cover, as you might expect, and I spent a dollar on that book, one of my better investments. What a treasure it is. The book covers Italian celebrations throughout the year, another Book of Days of sorts. And though I will go long spells without pulling it off my bookshelf, I always think of Helen Barolini on this night, this 20th of January, because of something she wrote in that book about this night, St. Agnes Eve, the night before the Feast of St. Agnes of Rome, patron saint of young girls and Girl Scouts.

A bit about St. Agnes Eve customs first: tradition tells us that this is a night for romantic divination. I think of it as our first step toward the romance of St. Valentine’s Day. It has long been held as a night when young girls might expect to see visions of their future loves. In Italy, they might go to bed tonight without supper, quite voluntarily, so that they might dream of their future husbands. In Scotland, where Agnes is a common name (as is its reverse version, Segna), they will go to bed sated, but may stay up later than usual. There, the custom is to throw grain onto the soil of a field at midnight while reciting the following spell:

Agnes sweet and Agnes fair,
Hither, hither, now repair;
Bonny Agnes, let me see
The lad who is to marry me.

In other places, young girls will be baking cakes with the hope that their future husbands will come and turn them, or they will be walking to bed backwards with the hope that their future husbands will come to them in their dreams, or they will be eating a hard boiled egg before bed, yolk removed, the cavity filled with salt. The hope there, too, is to see their future husband. (With any luck, he’ll be carrying a pitcher of water, as well.)

Helen Barolini’s touching passage about St. Agnes Eve in her book Festa is about meeting, and losing, the love of her life, the writer Antonio Barolini: And though I fasted and hoped to see my intended as I slept on that eve, I never did picture Antonio Barolini in my imagination or in my dreams. But now I think how strange it is that his death came on January 21, Saint Agnes Eve.

She made an error in the day (January 21 is St. Agnes Day, not St. Agnes Eve), but still, that passage remains for me a poignant one. Our joys, our sorrows, intertwined, like the intimate dance of saints’ days and old customs that, in most cases, predate those days. These are the old stories that fascinate me.

For us English Majors, perhaps the first thing we think of most when we hear the words St. Agnes Eve is the Romantic narrative poem written by John Keats in 1820. It makes for fine reading this night, full, as it is, with the romance and ghostly apparitions one expects from a poem of that era, perfect for a cold wintry night like St. Agnes Eve. But it is a commitment, for it is a very long poem, indeed. Here, if you can’t read the poem in its entirety, is the sixth stanza:

They told her how, upon St. Agnes’ Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey’d middle of the night.
If ceremonies due they did aright,
As, supperless to bed they must retire,
And couch supine their beauties, lily white;
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.

And though I’ve hundreds of books in my bookcase that I’ve purchased over the years and not yet read, I am once again reading Helen Barolini’s Festa. Her book begins in December, which is not at all a bad place to begin a year, as so much of January is wrapped up still in the celebrations of midwinter. Christmas songs are still in my head as I go about my days, and I am still at work on this year’s Copperman’s Day print. I may very well be working on it tonight, this wintry St. Agnes Eve… perhaps even upon the honey’d middle of the night.

 

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My apologies to subscribers: This was meant to be published before I went to bed on Friday night, but I was so tired, I forgot to do so. As a result, subscribers will receive notice of this newest chapter of the Convivio Book of Days on January 21. Perhaps I am just tuning into the spirit of Helen Barolini, who had confused the date of St. Agnes Eve in her book. At any rate: my apologies if you’ve missed a chance at romantic divination for St. Agnes Eve, and if perchance you were not planning on divination, then that’s fine: just enjoy the read.

Our image today is an illustration for another poem called “St. Agnes Eve,” this one by Tennyson: more religious, less romantic, but just as cold and snowy. Wood engraving by the Dalziel Brothers after a design by Sir John Everett Millais. Published in Some Poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edward Moxon Edition, 1857. Royal Academy Collection, London, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Jan 13 2024
Christmas, St. Knut's Day, Yule

Plunder the Tree! It’s St. Knut’s Day

In Sweden, the Christmas season began last month with Sankta Lucia’s Day on the 13th of December, and now, one month later, on this 13th of January, comes St. Knut’s Day: it is the day there when Christmas ends. And it ends with a plundering: All the cookies and candies that decorated the tree get eaten up! The Swedes like to dance around their Christmas trees with simple arm-linked rounds and skips, and this, too, will happen today, as it did on Christmas Eve… and then, finally, the tree is taken down (and sometimes tossed out the window).

I love things like this… and this, no doubt, is because I am a follower of rules. I stop at every stop sign I encounter on the road, I do every single push-up and jumping jack I’m told to do by my trainer, I do not cut corners. In Sweden, we know: Christmas begins now! (Sankta Lucia says so.) Christmas now is done! (Sankt Knut says so.) Organized rules! How grand is that?

Here in the States, we have no clear rules for these things. There was a time not all that long ago––in my grandparents’ day, when my mom was a kid––when folks got their Christmas trees on or near Christmas Eve and it was considered bad luck to remove Christmas decorations before Epiphany. But no one cares about luck these days and the rules have all been tossed out the window (along with the tree, perhaps). And though outwardly I am not a terribly organized person––my boss stepped into my office doorway earlier this week and, with widened eyes, said, “Whoa, I thought my office was messy”)––I do, in fact, love order. As Björk sings in one of her songs (a song called “Hunter”): I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me. I like knowing the rules and that’s probably my incentive in writing this Book of Days. I like knowing what’s expected of me each day.

And so while we here in the States never know, once Christmas Day has passed, when we might see a Christmas tree tossed curbside, it seems that in Sweden everyone knows that the tree comes down on St. Knut’s Day, for it, apparently, has always been thus. And how wonderful, too, that it’s done in a celebratory way: plundering the tree, smashing the gingerbread houses, gobbling up every last cookie and cake, and dancing rounds ’round the tree to songs with lines like Tjugondag Knut dansas julen ut och då plundras och kasseras granen!: “The 20th of Knut dances Christmas away and then the tree is plundered and thrown away!”

So we are, according to the Swedes, at the 20th Day of Christmas. Just enough days to count on all our fingers and toes. And certainly now a bit of clarity from this rule-follower is in order: Several weeks ago I told you there are two ways of counting the Twelve Days of Christmas and that the version I like best holds six days in the old year and six days in the new. I stand by that system, for I love the symmetry as Christmastide spans the ages. It is mostly churches that count the days differently, with the First Day of Christmas being Christmas Day (giving us seven days in the old year and five in the new)… and this is how the Swedes reckon things, too. For Sinkt Knut’s Day is widely known as Tjugondag and that word Tjugondag means “twentieth day.”

Aside from the plundering and the dancing, there are some regions of Sweden where folks would open their doors to all the neighbors in an effort to rid the home of all leftover Christmas treats… and once that was accomplished, the woman of the house would, armed with her broom but all in good fun, run through the house, sweeping under sofas, tables, and chairs, and then shooing all the guests out with blows of her broom, shouting, “Out Knut! Now Christmas is over!”

Here’s another end-to-Christmas song for dancing ’round the tree and smashing the gingerbread houses on this Tjugondag; it’s called “Nu är Glada Julen Slut, Slut, Slut”:

Snart är glada julen slut, slut, slut.
Julegranen bäres ut, ut, ut.
Men till nästa år igen
kommer han vår gamle vän,
ty det har han lovat.

Or, in English:

Soon merry Christmas is over, over, over.
The Christmas tree is carried out, out, out.
But until next year again
comes he our old friend,
for he has promised.

And good old Father Christmas does promise just this. I love the directness of Swedish Christmas songs. The most famous of them is the song that’s in the image at the top of this post: “Nu är det Jul Igen”. But that’s for the start of Christmas, at Christmas Eve, when folks first dance around the tree. It’s a centuries-old nonsense song whose lyric translates to, Now it is Christmas again and it will be Christmas until Easter. No! That isn’t true, for in between comes Lent. And so it does. Lent will come, Easter will come, Midsommar will come and the sun will never set, and then it will be harvest time and it will grow dark and Sankta Lucia will come and then it will be Christmas again.

Our image for today is from a print I purchased two Christmases ago at our local Swedish Julmarknad, or Christmas Market, which comes each November or December (depending on the year) at the First United Methodist Church in Boca Raton, Florida. Convivio Bookworks has a pop-up shop at the Julmarknad each year. It’s always a delightful afternoon!

Did you know we sell some truly delightful Scandinavian specialty foods at our shop? Just last weekend, my sister made homemade riskrem, the wonderful traditional Norwegian rice pudding. To make it, she cooked our Scandinavian Porridge Rice in milk, then added freshly whipped cream, and served it with our Wild Swedish Lingonberries and Vanilla Powdered Sugar. I added cinnamon and cardamom to the leftover riskrem with some additional vanilla powdered sugar and it was truly sublime. Oh, I wish I had more right now! Our Löfbergs Coffee from Sweden is also so good. It’s our favorite coffee in this house. I like the medium roast, but there is also a dark roast. Each bag contains over a pound of ground coffee.

 

Jan 07 2024
4 Comments
Christmas, Copperman's Day, Plough Monday, St. Distaff's Day, Twelve Days of Christmas, Yule

Bid Christmas Sport Good Night

ST. DISTAFF’S DAY
January 7

Even as the Twelve Days of Christmas end, Christmas, in its way, lingers: The season has such a grand presence that even what follows is informed by it or comes about as a result of it. And so it goes with today, the Seventh of January, when we celebrate St. Distaff’s Day, which is the first of two Back to Work holidays that come about after the Twelve Days. This one is for the women. The next Back to Work holiday is for the men. It’s called Plough Monday, and it comes on the Monday after Epiphany, which this year is on the Eighth, but, depending on the day of the week on which Epiphany falls, could be up to six days later than St. Distaff’s Day. This suggests to me that it was the men who made the rules here. Be that as it may, it is Robert Herrick, our wonderfully convivial 17th century British poet, who gives us our best description of the day (and some very good advice in the first two lines):

Saint Distaff’s Day, or the Morrow after Twelfth Day
by Robert Herrick, 1648

Partly worke and partly play
Ye must on St. Distaff’s Day:
From the Plough soone free your team;
Then come home and fother them.
If the Maides a-spinning goe,
Burne the flax, and fire the tow:
Scorch their plackets, but beware
That ye singe no maiden-haire.
Let the maides bewash the men.
Give St. Distaff all the right,
Then bid Christmas sport good night;
And next morrow, every one
To his owne vocation.

Women have always had a lot of domestic tasks to handle, but during the Twelve Days of Christmas, one of those tasks would be paused: the spinning of fiber to make cloth. And if she had a spinning wheel in her home, on the afternoon of Christmas Eve each year, when greenery from nature would be brought in to decorate the home, one of the key items to be decorated was the spinning wheel: greenery would be wound through all the spokes and over the wheel and it would be beautiful of course but also, as a result, unusable. Which was the whole point. No work was to be done for the Twelve Days of Christmas––though we can be sure that the women had plenty of other work to do during the holiday. And on this day each year, January 7, the day following Epiphany, it was back to the spinning for the women, and it was St. Distaff who led the way.

Oh but wait! This saint is no saint at all. Saints were real people like you and me before they were named saints, but St. Distaff is fictional. The English have a long history of creating saints’ days for saints that never existed at all. St. Monday was the name given to the long weekends sometimes taken by shoemakers, and St. Tibb was often used as a metaphor for never, as in, “Hey, I lent you a shilling last week; when will I get my money back?” “Worry not, I’ll be sure to have it back to you by St. Tibb’s Day.” Which is all well and good until the lender realizes that there is no St. Tibb’s Day. Neither St. Tibb nor St. Monday ever existed; nor did St. Distaff. The distaff, however, was a central tool to what was considered in those days “Women’s Work”: the spinning of wool or flax to make fiber for weaving into cloth. The distaff and spindle were the tools that preceded the spinning wheel, and rare it would have been to find a woman who knew not how to use them. We get the word spinster from this, which was once a recognized legal term in England to describe an unmarried woman, and the terms spear side and distaff side were also legal terms to distinguish the inheritances of male from female children.

And so the women returned to their spinning each Seventh of January, this “morrow after Twelfth Day.” Meanwhile, the men were still underfoot in the house. Their job on St. Distaff’s Day was one of mischief, with the goal usually being to set fire to the flax the women were spinning. The women were wise to this custom, though, and typically kept several buckets of water nearby. Very often, it was the men who got the worst of it: to have a bucket of water dumped on you in the cold of January (that’s the “bewash the men” part)… for sure, St. Distaff’s Day lent a bit of excitement to the sport of returning to ordinary time. Meanwhile, the men had customs of their own to attend to, preparing for their day.

PLOUGH MONDAY
First Monday after Epiphany, which this year will be Monday January 8

The men got a moveable date for their traditional Back to Work day. The men’s work focused on the farm, and on this Plough Monday it would be not at all unusual to see a gaggle of men parading through the village with a finely decorated plough. The men themselves would be finely decorated, too, in all manner of foolish costumes, hearkening the Feast of Fools aspect of the Twelve Days of Christmas that have just passed. One man will be dressed as the Bessy, an old woman, and there she is again: the personification of the old hag of winter, the goddess in her crone stage. There would be mysterious old dances and a good deal of noise in the banging of drums and the blowing of horns, and perhaps the performance of an old mummers play, and, certainly, there would be a collection box passed around to help pay for the sport (as well as a few rounds at the tavern). There would be a ceremonial ploughing of the ground, too, very often through the dirt road that ran through the center of town. Those who were too stingy to contribute risked having the path from the road to their door ploughed, as well. Best, then, to contribute a few pennies to the men’s sport.

There is another old tradition in the Netherlands for this First Monday after Epiphany, little known, but important to those in the print trade (and to us here at Convivio Bookworks, for we are, at heart, a print shop): It is Copperman’s Day, a traditional Dutch printer’s holiday in which the printshop apprentices would be given the day off so they could work on a project of their own. The small prints that were a result of the day were typically sold for a copper apiece. I’ve been a printshop apprentice many times in my life: before, during, and after grad school, while I was earning my MFA in the Book Arts from the University of Alabama, I would go to Maine each summer to apprentice with various printshops there: once with David Wolfe at Wolfe Editions in Portland, and twice with Brother Arnold Hadd at the Shaker Press at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community in New Gloucester… which began our long friendships with both wonderful guys, but especially with the Shakers, who by now are like a second family to us.

I make a Copperman’s Day print most years… but, as with everything else here at Convivio Bookworks, I tend to be a little slow about it, and though I’ll begin on Copperman’s Day, or maybe even on St. Distaff’s Day, it will be pretty amazing if I finish by the time Copperman’s Day is done. When this year’s print is done, though, I will let you know here on the blog, and perhaps even show you some progress on our Instagram page (@conviviobookworks). Meanwhile, CLICK HERE to see all of our previous Copperman’s Day prints. Just like St. Distaff’s Day and Plough Monday, you’ll find our Copperman’s Day prints are also informed by a lingering Christmas spirit. This year’s will be no different.

And so: Back to work, back to the workaday world. In this house we are holding on to our Christmas greenery and music all through January, until Candlemas, as is our custom… but even with these trappings of Christmastime still in the house, we are back to earning a living again, and earning our daily bread, and back to regular routines.

 

Today’s two images, like bookends on this chapter, are taken from the Chambers Bros. Book of Days, published in Edinburgh, 1869. The top one illustrates their chapter on St. Distaff’s Day; the bottom one, Plough Monday. You may click on each to make the images larger.

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