The Midwinter Moon is full tonight at 7:33pm. December 26th is also several other significant dates. It’s the first night of Kwanzaa. I like this holiday though I don’t do anything with it. I applaud Maulana Karenga for working out a holiday that is rooted in reality and celebrates neglected cultures. You’ll not be surprised to learn that Kwanzaa is one of the inspirations for this blog. We’re taking back time from the dominant culture. But Kwanzaa isn’t for me in any sense. (Though I have thought hard about buying the book of Kwanzaa recipes from Smithsonian…)
Today is also Boxing Day. This is a national holiday in Canada. It’s merely a strong tradition in England and Australia. This is not a day to box up all the crap from December 25th and return all the unwanted gifts, though you’d be forgiven for thinking that. It is also not another Christmas, though that happens too in some places. This holiday is a living relic from the Roman age. On this day, privileged people box up what they feel like shedding, and they give it to the poor. Employers give boxed gifts — mostly food and small practical things — to their employees. It is not even unheard of to find your landlord has left a box of biscuits in the post slot. Boxing Day saw its peak in the mid-20th century. It has fallen on the neoliberal hard times that have caused most benevolent impulses to founder. Now, it is largely a day of boxing up the crap and returning the unwanted gifts…
December 26th is also St Stephen’s Day. We know this day from the song Good King Wenceslas written in the 19th century about a 10th century Bohemian duke (not king) of a chunk of land in what is now the Czech Republic. Wenceslas looked out on the Feast of Stephen and saw a pauper gathering fallen wood for his hearth. The duke decided to take alms to the poor even though the snow was lying round about deep and crisp and even. The duke took a page with him, presumably to carry the alms, but the boy couldn’t manage the deep snow. So the duke plowed a trail through and had the child follow in his footsteps.
St Stephen was the first martyr to the Christian faith. He was a deacon in the early church in Jerusalem who very publicly ticked off the city authorities with his blasphemies. He was stoned for his words on 26 December 36AD. It is said that Saul of Tarsus, the later apostle Paul, participated in the stoning of Stephen.
The Feast of Stephen is celebrated in much of the Christian world in ways that have nothing to do with Stephen or Christianity. Mummers run amok. They eat pasta in Catalonia and have stoning drinking contests in Bavaria. But in Ireland the Wren Boys are out. I have not one clue how this tradition began nor what it means. A group of young men will go hunt the wren in the early morning. They then mount the dead bird on a tall pole and carry it around the village begging for pennies to bury the wren. What alms they receive almost always go to the local pub.
There isn’t much hunting of the bird these days. They use stuffed or carved toys carried in elaborate cages. Also… they dress a bit funny. But they do sing for their alms. It’s generally a good time had by all when the Wren Boys show up.
I wrote this month’s Full Moon Tale at least a decade ago now. It is one of my favorites. It is also relevant to what I’ve been reading lately and how I’ve been feeling since July’s flood. I am starting to wonder, you know…
But mostly I just think it’s funny. A good time was had by all fun… So here ya go.
Winter Home
My grandmother was a treasure-trove of faerie lore. She told her grandchildren the many stories of sightings and close encounters she’d heard as a young child in Ireland. She respected the taboos and set out food on required nights. She cultivated all the flowers she knew would most please the Good People. Far enough from the back porch to keep the mischief outdoors, mind. Never invite them into your house, if you know what’s good for you. But she never told me, before she passed on, where the Good People go in wintertime. I had to learn that on my own.
We bought the farm in the spring. It was my husband’s fondest ambition to scratch a living out of good, organic soil in northern California, perhaps brewing boutique label ales as the mood struck. He was fast approaching disgusted with his job as a civic engineer, designing bridges with no buttressing budgets. I was tired of a dead-end position at an nth-market newspaper, writing stories nobody read and chasing fires nobody put out. In the spring of that year I sold off stock inherited from my frugal grandfather — he was Scottish, god rest his soul — and we bought the farm, so to speak.
It didn’t turn out to be northern California.
One afternoon, having nothing to do at the office but obey a requirement to stay there, I started to do a little virtual traveling by way of foreign real estate listings. The expensive kind. The kind with turrets in Bavaria and minarets in Hungary. The kind in which whole Swiss mountains are for sale by impoverished descendants of 19th century royalty. The first thing I noticed about this particular property was the price; it was dirt cheap, loads of cheap dirt. The second was that it came with stock. Not my grandpa’s stock, but stock stock. In this case, a herd of sheep. Not less than one-hundred fifty healthy animals, the advertisement read.
I broached the subject one evening at home after falling in love with the internet advertisement. I had spent entirely too much work time dreaming about the idea; my reasoning was a little impaired. Anyway, one evening I broached the subject. Two months later we were flying to New Zealand.
The farm, not more than an hour from Wellington as we both noted with enthusiasm, was even more lovely that it had appeared to our distant eyes. The soil, well suited to growing barley and hops. There was even a sheltered slope that might, with enough effort and without the sheep, support a vineyard which pleased me greatly. (I just never have cultivated a taste for beer.) It was all we had ever dreamed. So, being rash and impetuous, we sold grandpa’s stock and bought some of our own, along with a tidy bit of land.
That whole year was one humongous, protracted move. Quitting jobs. Taking leave of our families. Shipping what we couldn’t part with across the ocean. This last turned out to require the least effort. When taking inventory my husband and I noticed that we had amassed a great deal of junk, pure and simple. Holiday decorations from retail monoliths (and made, incidentally, much closer to where we would be moving). Furniture we couldn’t remember acquiring and old cast-offs that we’d never bothered to replace. Office clothes that would never do as farm attire. We moved our dogs, our inherited china and some kitchenware, our computers, a few crates of memories and very little else.
And then we were there, and the unpacking and the learning began. We first learned that the farm foreman was a crook. He was gone very soon. We next learned that we hated sheep. They were gone soon after. I know our neighbors were laughing into their shoes at night, watching my husband and I trying to adjust to our novel lives. But adjust we did.
Of course, we had changed poles, so we had extra time to adjust. We bought the farm in the spring, the southern winter. So we had extra time to learn all that we needed to learn. We sold off the flock for a tidy sum. As I look back on it, it seems that what we had paid for in purchasing the farm was the flock. That should have warned us, right there. But we were busy learning. We planted hops, herbs, and laid in a lovely vineyard on the hillside. We built a brewery and a drying barn. We renovated and excavated, turned earth and moved igneous rock, planted and pruned, relentlessly pursuing all our desires and idyllic fancies. And by the end of that year we had largely achieved our goals.
We had a relatively decent harvest that year from the herb and vegetable fields. We didn’t expect anything more. We sold the herbs at a good profit to Chinese medicinal impresarios and the vegetables mostly at farmer’s market for much less profit. And we were still within the financial black — largely due to the sheep sale — when the austral autumn ended.
But the whole summer things had been happening. There is no other way to put it. Things is the only word that encompasses the phenomena. As soon the northern latitudes cooled to winter and we warmed to summer, strange things began to happen and they continued without abatement.
To take one of the earlier instances, one day in October our old retriever, Bunny, came tearing around the house in a blind panic that took nearly an hour to assuage. Bunny hadn’t done any tearing for many years; she was thirteen years old, ancient for a dog, arthritic and nearly blind. She’d never been a dog for much activity even when young. She was a retriever that didn’t retrieve, preferring to sneer at lesser dogs for behaving so doggy. She was tearing that day, however, and she was only calmed down by force.
After we got her settled down, we decided to take both canines for a walk. This was usually a high point for both of them, giving Bunny a chance to strut and Boomer an opportunity to release a bit of his copious energy. Boomer was an unidentifiable mutt that we found we couldn’t live without one day while donating pet food to the Animal Humane Society. From somewhere in his many genetic roots he had inherited an unquenchable spirit and untiring physique. He was the player; Bunny was the cuddler.
So we put them on leashes and walked out the front door of our garage, turned office. Immediately, two things happened. Bunny yanked herself free of her collar and disappeared around the house. Boomer pulled suddenly on his leash, toppling me into the dust, and went chasing after a small, bright object flying just beyond his nose in the erratic path of a butterfly, but at jet speed. Whatever it was outpaced Boomer within minutes and was gone before we could identify it.
New Zealand has some mighty large and strange insects. We probably should have paid more heed to the flying thing, but we didn’t. We chalked it down on the ever widening list of foreign pests. At the time, I think understandably, we were more worried about our dogs than about yet another critter. We thought the thing had bitten Bunny; it was obvious she was terrified of it. Indeed, it took several disgustingly messy days to get Bunny to go outside again.
That was one of the earlier Things. After that, we didn’t see any of the strange critters my husband had dubbed the Rocket Bugs. So it took us a long time to correlate them with the other things. And why would we have? They didn’t seem to have anything to do with the happening Things. Things like drainage ditches filling with mudslides overnight. Farm vehicles roaming the countryside mysteriously and turning up upturned miles away. Vandal kids had always been a problem, the locals told us solemnly. A field of echinacea, brooding for the year on its valuable taproots, was uprooted and trampled. By wild pigs, the farmhands proclaimed. And, as a parting shot in the middle of the harvest season, a large swath of my vineyard hillside was cleared utterly in a freak volcanic eruption.
We were barely solvent at the end of the year. All the stock money was gone. We were considering selling off some property to pay for the vineyard loss. We hired a third fewer field hands because we couldn’t pay them. And those hired got paid less than those of our first, and only prosperous, growing season. But things happen, we told ourselves. And since they don’t continue to happen, things will get better, we always added.
Looking back, I have to admit I was embarrassingly blind. My grandmother would have laughed out loud before proscribing behaviors to ameliorate the situation. We went through the winter and much of the spring without incident that year. Not one act of human or natural destruction, nor even a mild bump of misfortune. The hops came up well, as did the perennial and biennial herbal crops. We found a better market for our winter vegetable crop, selling it for a good profit. And the dogs were as contented as dogs can be. I should have been at least curious, let alone suspicious.
What good fortune we had from our land in the winter was decimated in the summer. The vandals returned in force. The property was lousy with natural disasters that never seemed to spread beyond our fences. And on midsummer eve in December, Bunny died of a heart attack.
We totted up the losses and came to the inevitable conclusion that we were never meant to own a farm. We would have to sell our dream or mortgage it heavily just to survive. So we decided to sell.
Shortly after putting the farm on the market in February I was walking my hillside, saying goodbye to my squelched dreams. I was just turning for home when a bright, winged creature flashed past, just outside of good view. I turned, wondering what new critter this was, and it hit me all at once. The Rocket Bug. The myriad forces of ill will. The failure of my farm. They were are related to this thing that flew past me. All the stories my grandmother ever told about them went just like my story. And I’d never noticed!
I ran home to tell my husband. It wasn’t our fault! Well, it was, but not in the ways we’d ever imagined because our limited imaginations did not account for such exigencies. We could still farm if we desired, but not this farm. That was the main point. We had to get off this land. It was claimed for other purposes that we would never be able to change. We sold it at the first, very low offer, at a considerable loss that we thought a gift from heaven.
Turns out, most of our neighbors knew the cause of our misfortunes. Some, to be sure, meanly laughed and thought we American upstarts deserved to find out for ourselves. But most just thought we’d never believe it if told. It was common folklore that the hill, my vineyard hill, was the winter home, that is the northern winter home, of all the faerie folk.
And those little buggers did not mean to ever let humans farm their land.
©Elizabeth Anker 2023
By My Solitary Hearth 