The Daily: 30 November 2023

St Andrew’s Day

Today is St Andrew’s Day. Andrew, whose name means simply “a man” (though it can also be glossed as “virile” or “manly”), was the brother of St Peter. Both were fishermen and, as such, were part of the backbone of the local economy. He is imagined in this painting by Artus Wolffurt as an ascetic in his cave, but you can see two wooden beams off to the side — rather out of place in a rocky cave. This is an allusion to Andrew’s death. He was crucified by Rome for being an ardent disciple.

He is shown reading what looks to be his own journal, or something that is penned in Greek or Hebrew paired with a quill and an ink-pot. (Though one wonders how a fisherman would have learned to read and write…) However, the biblical books inspired by Andrew, the Acts of Andrew and the Gospel of St Andrew, are both considered apocryphal and are not much read even by scholars, I gather. Andrew, himself, is a quiet figure in the story of Jesus and his disciples, though Andrew is also known as the First-called, being the first of those disciples. He seems to me to have principally been the sort of solid and steady supporter that keeps the whole enterprise going, like the church ladies or the library volunteers. The people who show up and do whatever needs to be done. His brother might have been “the rock”; but Andrew was the one who was just always there, unquestioning, never needing or wanting the spotlight. I would have liked to read his thoughts, I think.

Today, St Andrew is patron saint of Scotland — among many other countries — and Andrew’s feast day is the national day of Scotland. So, if you are inclined, it is time to break out the bagpipes and plaid kilts and paint thinner… I mean, malt whiskey. You have my permission to skip the haggis.

In much of northern and eastern Europe, St Andrew’s Day also marks the opening of the winter holidays. Now you can start the holiday cleaning and decorating — though I know many of you already have the lights up and the tree decorated. One of the traditions around this day, or on the Sunday closest to St Andrew’s Day, is to begin the Christmas pudding. Traditional fruitcake takes several weeks to mature, during which time you have to feed it more alcohol every week or so. On St Andrew’s Day or Stir-up Sunday everyone who will eat the Yuletide feast gathers to start making it. Good luck will follow whoever takes a turn stirring up the sticky dough. Even toddlers get to have go at it.

There is an intriguing allusion in the Oxford Book of Days (Oxford Press, 2000) 30 November entry. They claim that in Greece St Andrew’s Day is celebrated with pancakes. Or at least failure to make pancakes on his day brings down calumny on your frying pans. I can find nothing else about this, and I had no idea that pancakes were a thing in Greek cuisine. But I wholly endorse any reason to have pancakes for dinner. It also seems a good ritual feast for a work-night — quick, filling and almost infinitely adaptable. For example, I have this roasted pumpkin in the fridge… think maybe there will be pumpkin pancakes and warm cider for dinner, and then perhaps I’ll get started on the tree trimming since I have a fake one now and can put it up whenever — and maybe leave it up until Candlemas if I want.

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And so, just like that, tomorrow is December, and the end of 2023…

In my house, the season of Midwinter begins today. This is also the traditional beginning of the winter holiday season. Those who claim that Christmas begins earlier all the time are wrong on a timescale of more than the last few decades. In fact, from the concentration of feast days for vernacular saints spread throughout Europe, beginning around the midpoint between Samhaine (the beginning of winter) and the Julian-calendar date range for the solstice (25-27 December), it seems that the tradition of starting Christmas at the end of November predates Christianity. This is when the holy days leading up to the renewal of the sun begin. It is Advent.

Humans stopped celebrating the entire month before the solstice only in the Enlightened 18th century when wage work took over lives and put an end to celebration time. Until the mid-20th century, many workers were hardly allowed time for even the day of Christmas, and in places where the Puritanical bent toward wealth accumulation was strongest, celebrating the holiday was illegal. For example, observing Christmas was a crime in the Massachusetts colony. This ban on the festival was repealed in 1681, but Massachusetts did not legalize a holiday from labor until 1865. It is still considered laziness to take off more than Christmas Day to honor the season. Also, we still haven’t figured out that this is a season… not a day.

However, marketing latched on to our ancient inclination to revel in the last weeks of the growing darkness, especially our love of giving to each other in honor of the sun’s coming nativity. Here was a human trait that was ripe for consumerist abuse. Add in feasting and parties and symbolic decorations — and quite a lot of mediated psychological manipulation — and this month becomes a gold mine for those who would wrest wealth from the masses. This is the “season” that is expanding before the day. There are plastic Christmas trees in stores before Halloween. Christmas in July sales are ubiquitous. If business could figure out how to keep the money flowing without paying higher wages — to avoid the hard break on spending when people run out of credit in January — I am sure this consumer Christmas bonanza would never end. Notably, for many decades now, there has been an upward trend in the messaging around spending money on mostly disposable “gifts” for Valentine’s Day and Easter.

Living with the seasons, both biophysical and cultural (which used to be the same things), is not consumerist. If anything, holidays are the antithesis to consumption because holidays are time out of time, time off from labor, unproductive time. Hence the deep resistance to Christmas among the elites who need workers to be laboring on their behalf more or less constantly. If we truly celebrated a traditional Christmas, a Midwinter season, there would be no work done from St Andrew’s Day to Plough Monday. No work, meaning that there is no shopping, no wage-work supported entertainment, no production. Everybody would have time to be with loved ones, to rest and to revel, to reflect on the ending year and dream of the next. Everybody would have time to craft their own holiday, including the gifts and decorations and foods that traditionally mark this time.

Giving gifts doesn’t require spending. In fact, the best gifts come from outside our present economy entirely and usually involve time and effort and love, not money. Same for decorations. A bough from your garden set on the table is far more meaningful, traditional and beautiful than plastic bric-a-brac — no matter what is growing out there, from bare trees and evergreens to tropical flowers.

Similarly, gathering together requires no expense. Oh, you might want to put a little extra effort toward food and drink, but when everybody brings something to the feast, then a feast costs very little, not much more than whatever is normal for weekly groceries. And again, the best foods are those you produce yourself. This goes triple for alcohol, the biggest expense in most holiday parties. If you regularly brew your own ale, you have a party’s worth of much finer drink than anything you could buy — for no attendant expense at all.

Christmas is not expanding. If anything, it is contracting. It is nothing but another revenue stream, a reliable way, as Scrooge puts it, to part fools from their pounds and pennies. These days it is common for movie theaters to be open on Christmas Day, and many of the year’s most anticipated blockbuster films are now released on 25 December. This is the opposite of Christmas. It is not celebrating the time. It is not gathering together. It is not even pleasant.

And while there are plastic trees in the stores and canned holiday music poured all over public spaces, though office parties and obligatory gathering run from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, there is no holiday season. There is no holy day in any of this time. There isn’t even any rest. It is all work for wage-workers and all frenzied spending for those with cash or credit (increasingly the latter).

But there is a growing resistance to participating in this conveyor belt of wealth transfer. Partly this is because there are no longer wages that can support the transfer. But it is also a rejection of living out of time and out of place. It is a rejection of allowing capitalism to steal our days. It is a re-contextualizing of our life-ways and rebirth of real living. In the edge spaces of our world, holidays are becoming real again. And I am quite sure this terrifies those who are used to profiting from our constant labor.

If you want to engage in a radical act of resistance, if you want to bring down capitalism or the state or whatever label you want to throw at hierarchical distribution, if you want to be the change, then celebrate the true seasons. The season of Midwinter is beginning. It is time to rest from labor and bring peace to each other. It is a time away from monetized time. It is time to be wholly in your world.

These are the holidays! Go out and rejoice!

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Ancient Skywatching

The earliest known recording of a solar eclipse happened on this date in 3340BCE in Ireland. Of course, it wasn’t November 30, nor Ireland. This date is much older than the Indo-European and, therefore, “Celtic” influx. But it is close to the date that Newgrange was built, maybe within error bars on the estimated building date of 3200BCE.

This is the first recording that we know about, so undoubtedly there have been many records that have been lost. And of course they were already watching the skies for such events if they decided to record this one in some durable medium, probably at no small effort.

So consider this: ancient indigenous Europeans may have known to watch for eclipses and may even have been able to forecast them, calculating with whatever “simple” math they used — and no computers. They certainly could map the paths of sun and moon and stars with a high degree of accuracy by the time they built Newgrange.

Consider this as well: we have no evidence that Newgrange was built as a grave or other elite monument. This massive public undertaking was begun solely to mark the heavens — with likely some initiatory or religious function. This was not a case of elites forcing slaves to build. It was people marking what they believed was important, probably with more or less voluntary labor.

(Though I’m sure the teenagers complained copiously… )

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023