The First Day of Christmas

 

I'm copying and pasting this interesting post from John Forti:

The Tradition of celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas comes from a slower paced, and sometimes simpler time. A time where distant trips were long considered, local celebrations were spontaneous, and gifts were frequently hand crafted. They ushered in season of sharing from the abundance of home made goodies and enjoying small post holiday visits with friends and family (that are well adapted to pandemic times). The unexpected starry night warm enough to gather around a bonfire to sing carols, nosh, drink and revel with friends in a snowy landscape - The last minute, lunch on a gray day or pots of tea on a sunny afternoon.

Today helps to kick off the 12 Days of Christmas with Boxing Day and the Feast of Saint Stephen, when Medieval serfs went surfing for gifts, tokens and leftovers from extravagant holiday feasts. The first day of Christmas is also when a partridge in a pear tree symbolizes pure love and wishes for fruitfulness and abundance.

Visits may mean gift drops and hugs shared with friends and neighbors. Homemade cookies, port, art, bath-salts, beeswax candles, and firewood arrive to offer flavor, light, comfort and ease, and the knowledge that we are remembered or loved (or that we remember and love).

I while away quiet hours making botanical cards, straining cordials, bottling liqueurs, wrapping up herbal salves and soaps while holding thought and intention for each person who will receive them.

Between sipping on herbal tea and the hot-mulled wine I have kept slow simmering since Christmas, I make pomanders, stuff dates, prepare chestnuts to roast at the fire, and unhurriedly prepare the next meal.

2022 is a fine year to usher out with the ashes from last years fires. I am feeling the need, deep in my bones, to purge out the old.

Gardeners know to share the gift of abundance when seeds yield generously. So this year, I am passing along treasures I can part with to dear friends that I think would enjoy them; bagging and boxing for thrift, gift, compost and bonfire - all that I can part with in order to enter this new year, and this new phase unencumbered.

1000 points of light were said to be necessary to take care of our citizens, but pandemic has shown how many of our lights are out. There is too much darkness when millions of families rely on local food shelters. Our light is needed, almost as much as our help in rebuilding systems that will ensure that the ‘least among us’ are cared for as they tend to us from the front lines. But until then, I try to find common ground and share 'seeds' - trays of holiday meals, little extravagances, clothes, salves and aspirations for a brighter New Year.

Tradition would have us proceed with these little visits, meaningful exchanges, times of joy, and glimmers of hope throughout these 12 days of Christmas. Right through Twelfth Night revelry, and Epiphany on the 6th of January when we give our decorations back over to nature.

So, here’s to old traditions made new - as we ring out the old year, and plant seeds for well-being in the new!

The Heirloom Gardener - John Forti

I never asked Mom and Dad about their childhood Christmases

 

Here I am with my cousin Dick Higgins in about 1951.

It came to me this year that I never once asked Mom and Dad about their childhood Christmases.

What were they like, in 1920, in Gap Pennsylvania, when Fannie and David Kauffman were both alive, and my 5 year old mother had a 7 year old brother Lee and a 3 year old brother Dan? Where did they live?  Did they have a tree?

What were they like in 1920 in Morstien Pennsylvania, for my 6 year old father, his mother Margaret and his father Thomas, and his older brothers and sisters Sara, Mary, Julia, Tom, and Jack?  Was Joe born yet?  How was it on that little farm?  

I can't even imagine.  I grieve now that they never talked about their childhood Christmases.

So many things I never asked,  too self-absorbed.

Christmas Eve

art y Jane Newland

Christmas Eve

 by Christina Rossetti

Christmas hath a darkness

Brighter than the blazing noon,

Christmas hath a chillness

Warmer than the heat of June,

Christmas hath a beauty

Lovelier than the world can show:

For Christmas bringeth Jesus,

Brought for us so low.

Earth, strike up your music,

Birds that sing and bells that ring;

Heaven hath answering music

For all Angels soon to sing:

Earth, put on your whitest

Bridal robe of spotless snow:

For Christmas bringeth Jesus,

Brought for us so low.

Art by Luci Goldsmith

Temporarily deprived of documents

 On this day of all days, I had to leave my laptop in Intensive Care at the Mount IT room  Hugo,

the IT doctor, tells me it need more hours to recover, but that it should be ok by tomorrow.

Of course, snow is predicted for tomorrow, so I don't know if I'll be able to retrieve it.

In the meantime, I have this loaner laptop.  It works well, but none of my documents are stored here.

So all the artwork I've been storing , and all the poems,  and not available to me.  But here are some Solstice art and poems I've just pasted on .

so it goes

Approaching the Winter Solstice

 

Artist: Hannah Willow    Summoning the Winter Solstice

Here's some interesting information about the Winter Solstice:

"The Winter Solstice, also known as Midwinter, occurs around December 21 or 22 each year in the Northern hemisphere, and June 20 or 21 in the Southern Hemisphere. It occurs on the shortest day or longest night of the year, sometimes said to astronomically mark the beginning or middle of a hemisphere's winter. The word solstice derives from Latin, Winter Solstice meaning Sun set still in winter. Worldwide, interpretation of the event varies from culture to culture, but most hold a recognition of rebirth, involving festivals, gatherings, rituals or other celebrations. Many cultures celebrate or celebrated a holiday near the winter solstice; examples of these include Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Years, Pongal, Yalda and many other festivals of light. The solstice itself may have remained a special moment of the annual cycle of the year since neolithic times. This is attested by physical remains in the layouts of late Neolithic and Bronze Age archeological sites like Stonehenge and New Grange in the British Isles. The primary axes of both of these monuments seem to have been carefully aligned on a sight-line framing the winter solstice sunrise (New Grange) and the winter solstice sunset (Stonehenge). The winter solstice may have been immensely important because communities were not assured to live through the winter, and had to be prepared during the previous nine months. Starvation was common in winter between January to April, also known as the famine months. In temperate climes, the midwinter festival was the last feast celebration, before deep winter began. Most cattle were slaughtered so they would not have to be fed during the winter, so it was nearly the only time of year when a supply of fresh meat was available. The majority of wine and beer made during the year was finally fermented and ready for drinking at this time. The concentration of the observances were not always on the day commencing at midnight or at dawn, but the beginning of the pre-Romanized day, which falls on the previous eve."

-   Winter Solstice – Wikipedia

 

Artist:  Tina Heck

 

and this:

Winter Solstice Chant    by Annie Finch

 

Vines, leaves, roots of darkness, growing,

now you are uncurled and cover our eyes

with the edge of winter sky

leaning over us in icy stars.

Vines, leaves, roots of darkness, growing,

come with your seasons, your fullness, your end.

Winter Snow Tree    ( wallpaper)

I have faith in nights

 

Christmas in Longwood Gardens

So many places look enchanted with Christmas lights shining in the darkness.

Here's a haunting poem by Rilke:

"You darkness, that I come from,

I love you more than all the fires

that fence in the world,

for the fire makes

a circle of light for everyone,

and then no one outside learns of you.

 

But the darkness pulls in everything;

shapes and fires, animals and myself,

how easily it gathers them!—

powers and people—

and it is possible a great energy

is moving near me.

I have faith in nights."

-  Rainer Maria Rilke, On Darkness

 

in West Chester

in Gettysburg

in Cape May

Some knotted riddles tell

 

Artist:  Aron Wiesenfeld

Some accomplishments today;  posted the grades.  Many A's; 2 F's.       Assembled the plates of my homemade Christmas cookies to distribute to our employees tomorrow.

Meanwhile, here's a poem from Thomas Campion:

Now Winter Nights Enlarge

by Thomas Campion

Now winter nights enlarge

The number of their hours;

And clouds their storms discharge

Upon the airy towers.

Let now the chimneys blaze

And cups o’erflow with wine,

Let well-turned words amaze

With harmony divine.

Now yellow waxen lights

Shall wait on honey love

While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights

Sleep’s leaden spells remove.

 

This time doth well dispense

With lovers’ long discourse;

Much speech hath some defense,

Though beauty no remorse.

All do not all things well;

Some measures comely tread,

Some knotted riddles tell,

Some poems smoothly read.

The summer hath his joys,

And winter his delights;

Though love and all his pleasures are but toys,

They shorten tedious nights.

 

 

John Forti - Wreath from winter garden

I am the one who waits

 For the last few years  I did something here with the O Antiphons.  Not this year.  Time to give them a rest.

Here's another poem I love, by my poet friend Luci Shaw.  Luci will be 95 this year.

DECEMBER

By Luci Shaw

 

Last night I lay awake and practiced

getting old. Not difficult.

I needed to teach myself to love my destination

before I arrive.

As time stretches ahead I feel the earth shift

and my writing hand shakes—its rubbery nudges

stretching, then growing weak, the way a day

will lose its light and give itself to darkness,

that long, questioning pause of inquiry—What next?

And how long before light reopens

her blue eye? I am one who waits, still,

to arrive somewhere, some bright nest

where language breeds, unhindered, where

I can dip into the moving edges of words

and breathe their profound syllables and

can live there a long time, with enjoyment

and never need to come up

to breathe.

This was taken of myself and Luci  at the wonderful Glen West Workshop in Santa Fe in 2012

art by Walter Launt Palmer

The wise trees stand sleeping in the cold

 

Artist:  Iris Scott

Glorious, sunny, blustery winter day today.  I played Christmas music in my room and in the car.

I remarked that , at Christmas, the dead return to sing:  Frank Sinatra with "Mistletoe and Holly,"

Bing Crosby with "It's Beginning to look a lot like Christmas", Nat King Cole with "Chestnuts Roasting by an Open Fire," Dean Martin with "Let it Snow",   not to mention the ancient composers and singers.

Here's a poem from William Carlos Williams:

Winter Trees

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

Gorgeous sunset over Dilworthtown PA.

 

lovelessness walks through the world

 

Art by Andrew Maccara

December 16 is a date I always associate with getting out of school for the Christmas holidays ; somehow I remember it as that date from way back in first grade. What a joy it was then!

The garden is cut back for the winter; all those lovely flowers and bushes are sleeping under the soil.

Hopefully, so are many bumblebees and caterpillars.

Here's a really depressing but beautiful poem by Ingeborg Bachmann:

On the Plazas of the City at Christmas

"Silent night, holy

night, when the bough flies from the tree

and is hung everywhere, when

from tables the crusts fly,

when the gifts begin to tremble

because lovelessness walks through the world,

because it snarls at you, barks at you from the snow,

and the silver ribbons rip and the tinsel rustles silvery,

and the silver and gold, and a golden word

come to you on which you choke

because you have been sold and betrayed,

and because it does not suffice that for you

one is redeemed who once died."

-   Ingeborg Bachmann, On the Plazas of the City at Christmas

    Translated by Peter Filkins

 

Artist:  Margaret Loxton

The candid freezing season again

 

Ive just discovered this poem by Anne Ridler, and I love it:

Expectans Expectavi

by Anne Ridler

 

The candid freezing season again:

 Candle and cracker,

 needles of fir and frost;

Carols that through the night air pass,

 piercing The glassy husk of heart and heaven;

Children's faces white in the pane,

 bright in the tree-light.

And the waiting season again,

 That begs a crust and suffers joy vicariously:

In bodily starvation now,

 in the spirit's exile always.

O might the hilarious reign of love begin,

 let in Like carols from the cold

The lost who crowd the pane,

numb outcasts into welcome.

 

Source: Collected Poems, Anne Ridler. Manchester: Carcanet, 1997

 

artist:  Lisa Graa Jenson

Hallow the vespers and December of our life

 

Artist:  Sussi Ana Aaberg          Saint Lucy

Today is the feast of Saint Lucy.  She's the patron of eyes, among other things.  Also the patron of writers!

Here's a poem to her by Thomas Merton:

Prayer to St. Lucy    by Thomas Merton

Lucy, whose day is in our darkest season,

(Although your name is full of light,)

We walkers in the murk and rain and flesh and sense,

Lost in the midnight of our dead world’s winter solstice

Look for the fogs to open on your friendly star.

We have long since cut down the summer of our history;

Our cheerful towns have all gone out like fireflies in October.

The fields are flooded and the vines are bare:

How have our long days dwindled, and now the world is frozen!

Locked in the cold jails of our stubborn will,

Oh, hear the shovels growling in the gravel.

This is the way they’ll make our beds forever,

Ours, whose Decembers have put out the sun:

Doors of whose souls are shut against the summertime!

Martyr, whose short day sees our winter and our Calvary,

Show us some light, who seem forsaken by the sky;

We have so dwelt in darkness that our eyes are screened

and dim,

And all but blinded by the weakest ray.

Hallow the vespers and December of our life, O

martyred Lucy:

Console our solstice with your friendly day.

 

 

artist:  Lisa Graa Jenson

Tricked and Traced by Memory's Gift

 

photo by Donna Breach Weitz

No snow yet around these parts.   My students have their exam tomorrow.  They have been an amazing group in their approach to the work.  

Here's a poem by Stephen Leake:

Presence              by Stephen Leake

Across the dark,

 a robin learns the Winter.

 A candle dissolves;

frank and sensuous

 Against the extending light.

The streets remain illegible with snow.

I travel through you; uncurling

Where weather decorates the night

And naves of Christmas pines

 Grasp human shadows.

Alone I go, echoing carols

 In powdered places.

 Echoes that are glorified. Prolonged.

Until I find you on the bench

 Pressed with our pasts.

A child again. 

Tricked and traced by Memory’s gift.

 Lasting.  Imprinted.

A proof of the year’s new world.

 

Art by Karen Davis

As evening unpeels our histories

 

Advent          by Stephen Leake

Somewhere your star-struck choir sings

 As the evening unpeels our histories.

 The world is here again!

I feel the breathing of  yuletide fires, 

The ribboned refrains of seasoned candles 

And bars of voices beyond St. Stephen’s Wall.

The robin appears in a globe of joy

 His carol negotiating wreaths of cloud 

And tinsled cakes of snow.

We wing into the holy day 

While the blinking eye of the gifting moon 

Receives you at that vanishing point

On memory’s path: 

Outlived by love Alone.

Source: http://www.christmas-time.com/adventleake.htm

"Shall we liken Christmas to the web in a loom?  There are many weavers, who work into the pattern the experience of their lives. When one generation goes, another comes to take up the weft where it has been dropped. The pattern changes as the mind changes, yet never begins quite anew. At first, we are not sure that we discern the pattern, but at last we see that, unknown to the weavers themselves, something has taken shape before our eyes, and that they have made something very beautiful, something which compels our understanding."

-   Earl W. Count, 4,000 Years of Christmas

 

For what shall I pray?

 Every morning I pray the Miraculous Medal Novena.  I've been doing this for more than a year, and each nine days, I choose someone or some thing to pray for in a special way.  After all my modern ideas, I still return to the faith of my childhood.  The Daughters of Charity say that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is their only mother.  No "Mother Superior" titles for their leaders!

I have prayed for my cousins, many of them by name. I have prayed for the people of Ukraine, and for the areas of  my own country devastated by tornados, hurricanes, fires.  I have prayed for our country, for the outcome of elections, for my friends, many of them by name. I have prayed for myself, for healing from all that radiation damage.  Yesterday one of my college friends asked me to pray for the prosecutor who is working on bringing Donald Trump to justice. So that's what I'm doing these nine days.  What else?

artist: Josie Wren

It's warm as long as the sun does not set

Artist:  Todd Young

No snow yet,   but we just had our December full moon.

Here's a poem by W.S. Merwin:

 

"This is what I have heard

at last the wind in December

lashing the old trees with rain

unseen rain racing along the tiles

under the moon

wind rising and falling

wind with many clouds

trees in the night wind."

-   W. S. Merwin

artist:  Kate Green

Here's a poem by Czeslaw Milosz;

"The vineyard country, russet, reddish, carmine-brown in this season.

A blue outline of hills above a fertile valley.

It's warm as long as the sun does not set, in the shade cold returns.

A strong sauna and then swimming in a pool surrounded by trees.

Dark redwoods, transparent pale-leved birches.

In their delicate network, a sliver of the moon.

I describe this for I have learned to doubt philosophy

And the visible world is all that remains."

-   Czeslaw Milosz, December 1^st

 

artist: Lars Van Der Goor

 

They keep coming between what they are and what I am

 It's a dreary, rainy December day.   I always seem to begin with the weather report!

Feast of Saint Nicholas -  Here is the romantic way he is pictured in art:

art by Anne Yvonne Gilbert

Here's a poem I love by W.S. Merwin, which is set on a day like today:

In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year                    by W.S. Merwin

It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young

Though I have long wondered what it would be like

To be me now

No older at all it seems from here

As far from myself as ever

 

Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing

I imagine all the clocks have died in the night

Now no one is looking I could choose my age

It would be younger I suppose so I am older

It is there at hand I could take it

Except for the things I think I would do differently

They keep coming between what they are what I am

They have taught me little I did not know when I was young

 

There is nothing wrong with my age now probably

It is how I have come to it

Like a thing I kept putting off as I did my youth

 

There is nothing the matter with speech

Just because it lent itself

To my uses

 

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars

It is my emptiness among them

While they drift farther away in the invisible morning

 

W. S. Merwin, "In the Winter of my Thirty-Eighth Year" Copyright © 1993 by W.S. Merwin, reprinted with permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

Source: The Second Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target The Lice The Carriers of Ladders Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (Copper Canyon Press, 1993)

 

 

art by   Seung Hwan Chung

hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself

 

Already five days into December... I've been occupied with remembering and mourning...

 I love this poem by Mark Strand:

Lines for Winter

BY MARK STRAND

for Ros Krauss

 

Tell yourself

as it gets cold and gray falls from the air

that you will go on

walking, hearing

the same tune no matter where

you find yourself—

inside the dome of dark

or under the cracking white

of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.

Tonight as it gets cold

tell yourself

what you know which is nothing

but the tune your bones play

as you keep going. And you will be able

for once to lie down under the small fire

of winter stars.

And if it happens that you cannot

go on or turn back

and you find yourself

where you will be at the end,

tell yourself

in that final flowing of cold through your limbs

that you love what you are.

Mark Strand, "Lines for Winter" from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1979 by Mark Strand.  Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Source: New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Autumn charms my melancholy mind

 The last day of November: the feast of Saint Andrew, and all kinds of Advent customs begin today.

It was rainy and grey and I made Christmas cookies, and listened to Christmas music.

We had another death here,  the third one in three weeks.  The sister was 98, and had just had surgery for a broken hip.  The surgery went well, and she was doing well, when all of a sudden - !!!  

artist: William Hawkins

I like this poem, by an author I'd never heard of:

Do not try to save

the whole world

or do anything grandiose.

Instead, create

a clearing

in the dense forest

of your life

and wait there

patiently,

until the song

that is your life

falls into your own cupped hands

and you recognize and greet it.

Only then will you know

how to give yourself

to this world

so worthy of rescue.

 

~ Martha Postlethwaite

 

artist:  Katrin Weitz Stein

I like this one, also:

November

 

by Elizabeth Stoddard

 

Much have I spoken of the faded leaf;

Long have I listened to the wailing wind,

And watched it ploughing through the heavy clouds;

For autumn charms my melancholy mind.

When autumn comes, the poets sing a dirge:

The year must perish; all the flowers are dead;

The sheaves are gathered; and the mottled quail

Runs in the stubble, but the lark has fled!

Still, autumn ushers in the Christmas cheer,

The holly-berries and the ivy-tree:

They weave a chaplet for the Old Year's heir;

These waiting mourners do not sing for me!

I find sweet peace in depths of autumn woods,

Where grow the ragged ferns and roughened moss;

The naked, silent trees have taught me this,—

The loss of beauty is not always loss!

 

artist: Jo Grundy

and this one, from one of my favorite poets, Wallace Stevens:

 

"It is hard to hear the north wind again,
And to watch the treetops, as they sway.

They sway, deeply and loudly, in an effort,
So much less than feeling, so much less than speech,

Saying and saying, the way things say
On the level of that which is not yet knowledge:

A revelation not yet intended.
It is like a critic of God, the world

And human nature, pensively seated
On the waste throne of his own wilderness.

Deeplier, deeplier, loudlier, loudlier,
The trees are swaying, swaying, swaying."

-   Wallace Stevens, The Region November

artist: Matthew Hasty

Such is Hope

 

artist:  Jo Grundy

Sonnet XVIII. to the Autumnal Moon

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

Mild Splendour of the various-vested Night!

Mother of wildly-working visions! hail!

I watch thy gliding, while with watery light

Thy weak eye glimmers through a fleecy veil;

And when thou lovest thy pale orb to shroud

Behind the gather’d blackness lost on high;

And when thou dartest from the wind-rent cloud

Thy placid lightning o’er th’ awakened sky.

Ah, such is Hope! As changeful and as fair!

Now dimly peering on the wistful sight;

Now hid behind the dragon-wing’d Despair:

But soon emerging in her radiant might

She o’er the sorrow-clouded breast of Care

Sails, like a meteor kindling in its flight.