Tag Archives: Twelve Days of Christmas

Jan 03 2021
Christmas, Yule

Joyeux Noël

NINTH DAY of CHRISTMAS
St. Genevieve’s Day

Francophiles will find it très bien to learn that today is St. Genevieve’s Day. Genevieve, sacred to Paris, that fair city’s patron saint, lived in Paris in the fifth century as a nun and is credited with saving the city from an attack by Attila and his Huns in 451. This she did through fasting and prayer, encouraging the residents of the city to join her. And around 475, she founded Saint-Denys de la Chapelle in Paris, which stands today as part of the Basilica of St. Denis.

I knew a Genevieve when I was a boy. She was an old friend of the family––a neighbor of my grandparents in the old neighborhood––and she was feisty and independent and she often wore a bandana on her head. Even in her old age, when I knew her, she would go up on the roof of her house in Fort Lauderdale and fix things that needed fixing. I like people like this. St. Genevieve strikes me as feisty and independent, too, and certainly someone who was not afraid to fix things that needed fixing, whether it be a leaky roof or dealing with invading Huns or getting a church built.

As the patron saint of the City of Light, I like to think of Genevieve as another of the midwinter saints who are light bearers at this dark time of year and who encourage us to be light bearers, too. She is often depicted holding a candle. As the story goes: the devil would time and again blow out her candle as she went to pray at night. Genevieve, however, relit her candle without need of flint or fire, always overcoming the darkness. (I picture her rolling her eyes each time, too.) As our wheel of the year goes, we are now thirteen days beyond the Midwinter Solstice; already light is increasing as we begin the journey toward summer’s warmth once more in the Northern Hemisphere. The light of St. Genevieve promises to never be snuffed by the darkness.

And while there are no particular customs (that I am aware of, anyway) associated with this Ninth Day of Christmas, there are plenty of you out there who love the food and culture of France. I think today, this Ninth Day of Christmas, is a fine day to enjoy those things fully. Joyeux Noël et bonne année!

 

Seth and I saw the house in the photo on a walk through our Lake Worth neighborhood on New Year’s Eve. I took the four letters for what they are (Leon), but Seth is convinced the folks inside were trying to spell Noel. Either way, it seemed a fitting image to use. Joyeux Noël from us, and from Leon.

 

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Jan 02 2021
Book of Days Calendar, Christmas, Yule

Something Sweet

EIGHTH DAY of CHRISTMAS
St. Macarius’s Day

Could be lunch, could be dinner, could be hot dogs or the most elaborate meal ever… in my family, the words that someone always utters afterward are the same: “Have we got something sweet?” We are a dessert people. A demitasse of espresso and a little something sweet puts the proper finishing touch on any meal. Here at home, Seth is even known to partake in what he has dubbed Breakfast Dessert.

This Eighth Day of Christmas is given to such things as we remember St. Macarius of Egypt, who earlier in life was a confectioner in Alexandria. Truth be told, he was not much fun in his later years: He left his confectioners’ trade and he left Alexandria to live an ascetic lifestyle as a hermit in the desert, where his sustenance came from a simple diet of raw vegetables and, only on the most special days, a bit of bread dipped in olive oil. (I can picture my grandmother, holding up her thumb pressed against her index and middle fingers, begging him to just mangia something more than carrots.) Be that as it may, and as completely un-fun as Macarius the Hermit became, it is Macarius the Confectioner we remember most these days, and this is why he is a patron saint of cooks, confectioners, and pastry chefs. And for certain his is not the easiest name to pronounce; for this reason he has also been known over the ages as St. Macaroon (perhaps St. Macaron in France?)––fitting enough for a confectioner, I’d say. Anyway, his feast day, falling as it does within the extraordinary time of the Twelve Days of Christmas, has become a day for sweets.

But first, before we go further, today’s post comes with a gift: it’s the January edition of the ongoing Convivio Book of Days calendar. Click here for the PDF, printable on standard US letter size paper. Cover star this month: a burlap sack of chestnuts, imported from Italy, for the humble roasted chestnut plays such an important role in our midwinter celebrations this month. I imagine Macharius the Confectioner knew this, as well, all those centuries ago. Good things remain constant.

Now, back to our saint. There is a rather nice story attributed to St. Macarius, a story he is said to have told his fellow monks in the monastery, who were interested in leaving the desert for the city. (They claimed it would help them reach more souls with their message, but I suspect they may have been tired of eating carrots and radishes all the time.) Macarius responded with a parable. He spoke of a barber in a small town who earned a small but decent living by charging three coins for a shave. He earned enough this way to sustain himself and his family and to even save a little extra for his old age. But he heard a rumor that barbers in the nearby city were charging a lot more than three coins for the same service. He thought long and hard about this, and finally, he made the decision to sell all he had in the small town and move to the city and set up shop there, where he could earn a larger profit for his services. And so he did.

Sure enough, at the end of his first day in the city, he had earned more than he had ever earned in the small town, and the barber was quite elated. And after closing up shop, he headed for the market to buy food and provisions for his family, but he found that everything in the big city market was much more expensive than it had been in the small town. Indeed, he ended up with no money at all in his pocket that day––a trend that continued each day after. Finally, the barber decided it would be best to return to his native town, where at least he made a small amount of progress each day in his savings.

Macarius and his fellow monks stayed in the quiet solitude of the desert. And of course there is a lesson in this story for all of us: a lesson of quiet patience, the understanding that sometimes what is best for us is right where we are. Which maybe is a good lesson for us in our particular time, too, when we are urged to just stay home. If you’re going to, you may as well enjoy something sweet this Eighth Day of Christmas.

 

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Jan 01 2021
6 Comments
Christmas, New Year, Yule

Wassail, Wassail, All Over the Town

SEVENTH DAY of CHRISTMAS
New Year’s Day

We’ve crossed the threshold from the old year to the new, and our journey through these Twelve Days of Christmas now grows more quiet and contemplative. At midnight, we toasted each other with wishes for a happy new year, but today, tradition would have us raise our cup once more. In an apple orchard, if you’ve access to one. But the Convivio way is to adapt old celebrations to what’s possible in our contemporary world. We live nowhere near an apple orchard (even orange groves are hard to come by ’round these parts these days). But we do have a yard and there are fruit trees there; we see no harm in continuing the traditions in a way suitable to our current reality. You should join us by celebrating in your unique way, too.

It begins with wassail. The toast is “Wassail!” and the drink is wassail, too. I made my first wassail when I was a teenager, for this is what unpopular teenagers do, and it was not very good, not at all. The recipe I followed came from a 1980s Betty Crocker cookbook. I remember cooking up a huge pot of the stuff on the stove in the kitchen at our house in Lighthouse Point. The result was insipidly sweet and put off my whole family from the start. But I’ve improved my research techniques since those younger years, taking bits and pieces of what I liked about various recipes, until I came up with this one. It is, I think, pretty wonderful. I think you’ll like it, too. The recipe here will serve a hearty group, but since we’re keeping to smaller celebrations this year, you may want to do what we’ll be doing and make just half of this recipe:

C O N V I V I O   W A S S A I L
Pour the contents of two large bottles of beer or ale (about 4 pints) into a pot and place it on the stove to heat slowly. Add about a half cup sugar and a healthy dose of mulling spices. (If you don’t have mulling spices on hand, you can use cinnamon sticks and whole cloves… though the mulling spices lend a more complex flavor.) Add a half pint each of orange juice and pineapple juice, as well as the juice of a large lemon. Peel and slice two apples and place the apple slices into the pot, too. Heat the brew but don’t let it boil, then pour the heated wassail into a punchbowl to serve.

New Year’s Day custom calls for us to share the wassail with those gathered but also to take the steaming punch bowl out to the orchard and toast the apple trees and share some with the oldest or biggest tree in the grove. Some folks pour the wassail on the trunk of the tree, while others dip the lower branches into the wassail bowl, and others may place wassail-soaked toast or cake in the branches of the tree. All of which are invocations of magic meant to encourage a good crop of apples next summer. Traditionally, the wassailing of the apple trees is done at the noon hour. Again, we believe you’d do best to let tradition inform your ways, but not dictate how your days go. So if your wassail happens to be late at night (as ours will most certainly be), there’s no harm in that.

Steaming punches like this were quite popular in olden times, on both sides of the Atlantic, and I am always up for bringing festive drinks like these back. A steaming punch begs to be accompanied by good Christmas songs and hearty exclamations like Huzzah! and Wassail! –– both of which have so much more spirit and gusto than our contemporary Cheers! Which is, of course, a good enough toast. But these twelve days are extraordinary days, so why not go for the superlative? One closing thought: in these strange pandemic times, perhaps we need a toast like Wassail! more than we know: the word comes to us from the Old English Wes Hel: “Be of good health!” Our wishes these days are simple; good health is something we would all take. And so then Wes Hel! Huzzah and cheers! And a happy new year to us all.

Image: That’s one of our annual Copperman’s Day prints. This one was made in 2017, and was inspired by the idea of wassailing and a general wish for good health (a wish, that year, for my dad). Copperman’s Day falls each year on the Monday after Epiphany. It is an old Dutch printers’ holiday, in which the print apprentices were given the day off to work on their own projects (which they then typically sold for a copper). We’ve been making Copperman’s Day prints most years since our first one in 2014. Like steaming bowls of punch, it is yet another Convivio Bookworks attempt at reviving old traditions. That’s us: ever the champion of the underdog.

 

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