{"id":2500,"date":"2016-01-07T01:50:15","date_gmt":"2016-01-07T06:50:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.conviviobookworks.com\/blog\/?p=2500"},"modified":"2016-12-15T23:32:33","modified_gmt":"2016-12-16T04:32:33","slug":"partly-work-and-partly-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.conviviobookworks.com\/blog\/partly-work-and-partly-play\/","title":{"rendered":"Partly Work and Partly Play"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"YoungGirlwithDistaff\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Christmas is past and now it is back to the ordinary workaday world. In older times, folks would cease most all work during the Christmas season, days considered outside of ordinary time. And here,\u00a0on the heels of Epiphany, would come a number of traditional back-to-work holidays. The first comes today, and it is named for a saint who never did exist; rather, St. Distaff’s Day is named for a tool\u2013\u2013one of those implements of the ordinary workaday world. Robert Herrick, one of our old favorite poets, wrote about St. Distaff’s Day in his 1648 book Hesperides<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Partly worke and partly play
\nYe must on St. Distaff\u2019s Day:
\nFrom the Plough soone free your team;
\nThen come home and fother them.
\nIf the Maides a-spinning goe,
\nBurne the flax, and fire the tow:
\nScorch their plackets, but beware
\nThat ye singe no maiden-haire.
\nLet the maides bewash the men.
\nGive St. Distaff all the right,
\nThen bid Christmas sport good night;
\nAnd next morrow, every one
\nTo his owne vocation.<\/em><\/p>\n

The distaff and the spindle were the common tools of spinning flax into cloth (the spinning wheel came much later), and with\u00a0St. Distaff’s Day this day after Epiphany, the women were back at their spinning. There was a more common division of labor back then, of course.\u00a0Any woman who spun thread (and that would have been most women in earlier times) would know the distaff well. Some trivia for you to impress people at parties:\u00a0Spinning was so associated with women\u2019s work that the word\u00a0spinster<\/em>, which is happily not much used these days, once was a recognized legal term in England to describe an unmarried woman, and the terms\u00a0spear side<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0distaff side<\/em>\u00a0were also legal terms to distinguish the inheritances of male and female children.<\/p>\n

The men were not back at work in the fields until Plough Monday, which always falls on the Monday after Epiphany. And with the men still underfoot in the house, their job on St. Distaff’s Day seemed to be a mischievous one: their goal usually was 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… for sure, St. Distaff’s Day lent a bit of excitement to the idea of returning to ordinary time. But this is the whole point of both St. Distaff’s Day and Plough Monday: yes, we may have to get back to work, but why not do it with a bit of ceremony and fun?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Image: “Young Girl with Distaff” by Pietro Rotari. Oil on canvas, early 18th century [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christmas is past and now it is back to the ordinary workaday world. In older times, folks would cease most all work during the Christmas season, days considered outside of ordinary time. And here,\u00a0on the heels of Epiphany, would come a number of traditional back-to-work holidays. The first comes today, and it is named for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36],"tags":[164,165,166],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.conviviobookworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2500"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.conviviobookworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.conviviobookworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.conviviobookworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.conviviobookworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2500"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.conviviobookworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3886,"href":"http:\/\/www.conviviobookworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2500\/revisions\/3886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.conviviobookworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.conviviobookworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.conviviobookworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}