Sunday, January 10, 2016

Jan. 4--10th Day of Xmas--"St." Distaff's Day



Let’s get one date straight: most sources put “St. Distaff’s Day” on January 7th, after the Twelve Days are over.  This makes a lot of sense, too, because it’s supposed to be the first day back to work after all the Christmas festivities.  But one of my sources says that it’s the Tenth Day of Christmas, and no one says anything else whatsoever about the Tenth Day in particular, and so for the purposes of this blog, let the Tenth belong to the saint called "Distaff"….

…Who never existed.  A distaff is a stick around which fiber to be spun into thread is wound—to keep it from getting tangled, you see.  So this back-to-work Day of Christmas (or after it) is named for something women worked with all the time.  Indeed, as a modifier noun, “distaff” can mean “of or pertaining to women”...So you have the "distaff (female)" side of the family, and the "spear (male)" side.  Of course, many women dislike the term because of its association with stereotypical women's work....Anyway, because “Distaff Day” was one of the days of Christmas, medieval folk started to call it “St. Distaff’s Day” as a joke.  So this is in fact a women’s day, except that it commemorates, well...that they have to go back to work. 



Nevertheless, the idea behind St. Distaff’s Day is not so cut and dried: time to get back to work, but not time to forget the fun of the Twelve Days.  You see, before Christmas became the orgy of gift buying and giving that it is today, adults got some little knickknacks, maybe, but the only ones who got “presents” were very small children.  With no shopping to do, that left a lot of time open for playing parlor games, for singing  and for laughing hard and often.  So even when the women got back to their spinning, weaving and sewing (since mothers were pretty much a one-woman sweatshop of thread, cloth and clothing manufacture at that time), the men made a game of trying to set fire to their hard-wrought textiles.  The women, for their part, kept large buckets of icy water handy to put out whatever flaming object was proffered—and douse the firebug as well!  Wee—hoo!  This is how Saint Distaff became the non-existent patron saint of practical jokes.

Mind you, this also adds St. Distaff's Day pranks to the role reversals and flour fighting and other zany, madcap revels that pop up regularly during the Twelve Days.  This un-Puritanical bit of fun gets us through the long, dark, cold days, and the figure of Jesus, as I have mentioned before, is revealed to have, or at least condone, a sense of humor and fun. 


...So, whenever it is you need to get back to work after the holidays, or even if you have to work the whole way through, you poor bastard--try to bring an uncommon level of fun to your days of toil.  I would discourage you from dumping a bucket of the wet stuff over your boss (unless you really can--in which case, have at it!), but you can (you must) adapt the principle of the thing to your circumstances.  Bring a joke book to work.  Wear a funny button or t-shirt.  Do the squirting flower gag.  Share lots of funny memes with coworkers and inter-networking friends.  Pull as many pranks as you can without getting divorced or fired.  Don’t let drudgery have its monopoly without a fight.  Give it wit, give it humor—give it mirth!  People will wonder if you have enlisted some chemical assistance in your battle for happiness, but so what?  Keep it light, keep it green.  


Above all, keep all Twelve Days of Christmas.  Two more to go.

The distaff is associated with women, yes, but in an interesting twist also reveals the Norse All-Father God, Odin (one of the most powerful beings in the Marvel multiverse!) as the equivalent of a cross-dresser.  You won't find Odin wielding a distaff in a Marvel movie, but you will find Loki mocking him, in an Icelandic saga, for using one in magickal rituals. You see, there was a brand of magic in the Old Norseland which made use of the distaff as a magical tool, sort of like a magic wand or staff or cauldron.  For a male to use this kind of magick was considered distinctly unmasculine--but Odin is the kind of guy who would pursue greater wisdom, knowledge and power at any cost.  He had already sacrificed one of his eyes, plus hung upside-down from a tree with a spear lodged in him for nine days in the pursuit of wisdom and mystical power--Loki's taunts weren't going to stop him.  In my mind, this makes Odin a patron saint of gender equality, of sorts, and balances out just a tad the relatively minor role that Norse goddesses play in the Norse myths that have survived to this day (to be fair, most of the myths we know of were recorded by a Christian monk, who may have redacted them heavily to equal the patriarchal one-sidedness of the Judeo-Christian Bible).

Why mention Odin at all in the context of the Twelve Days of Christmas?  Well, because, as the All Father, he bears a resemblance to Yahweh, the father of Christ.  He also is part of the source material for our contemporary legends of Santa Claus....You see, little Norse children would put their shoes outside, and fill them with hay for Odin's flying eight-legged horse Sleipnir (instead of 8 reindeer, eight legs!) as he rode the skies in mid-winter.  They would get little gifts in return.  Sound familiar?  Odin is also pictured, often, as a man with a white beard, and, like Santa, is associated with magical gifts.  And of course, Odin is associated with the cold North.



Incidentally, Loki's mocking of Odin's distaff magic may come from his own icky place inside, his own shame at an unmanly deed--as Sleipnir was Loki's own offspring, from that time when he'd had to, in order to get the gods out of a jam, change himself into a mare to lure a giant's stallion away from Asgard.  He got so far into the role that he, still in mare form, gave birth to the eight-legged colt Sleipnir a while later.  Even though he gave the colt as a gift to the All Father, you'd best believe he caught some hell for it during the feasting and drinking in Valhalla!


MUSICAL CHOICES  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdartdqjh56AHAVSW7w5IcX7xYU6l3lYo : 
 "Work B***ch" by Britney Spear (zumba by The Fitness Marshall and friends);
"Work" by Iggy Azalea (traducida en EspaƱol);
"Manic Monday" by  The Bangles;
"Back To Life" by Soul II Soul;
"9 to 5" by Dolly Parton with lyrics;
"I Don't Wanna Go To Work" by Lissie;
"Handbags & the Gladrags" by Rod Stewart;
"Atlantic City" by Bruce Springsteen;
"22 Grand Job" by The Rakes;
"Handyman Blues" by Billy Bragg;
"Bang the Drum All Day" (Live) by Todd Rundgren;
"Step Into My Office, Baby" by Belle & Sebastian;
"When I'm Cleaning Windows" performed by the late and great Peter Sellers on ukulele, and (original) by George Formby;
"Cleaning Windows" by Van Morrison;
"Witchita Lineman" by Glen Campbell
"Career Opportunities" (sung by children with The Clash);
"Career Opportunities" by The Clash;
"Spinning Wheel" by Blood, Sweat and Tears;


Folk Music about spinning & weaving: 
"The Band of Shearers" by Broceliande;  
Finbar and Eddie Furey - Dance Around The Spinning Wheel, 
The Hand-Loom Weavers Lament - Harry Boardman, 
The Island Spinning Song (Alastair o' the Dun) from the Forth Bridges Dance Band, 
Paddy Keenan, At First Light 
& Brian Haitz - Maid at the Spinning Wheel, The Maid at the Spinning Wheel, 
Catherine Ann MacPhee - O Hi Ri Lean, 
The Doffing Mistress - Anne Briggs cover - Traditional Folk Song,
Rabbie Burns - Tae the weavers gin ye gan,

Slim Whitman - The Old Spinning Wheel (Live), 
Phil Coulter - The Spinning Wheel, 
Dixon Brothers- Weave Room Blues,
Steeleye Span -  The weaver and the factory maid, 
Wee Weaver - Steeleye Span, 
The Spinning Wheel - Eileen Donaghy

Sunday, January 3, 2016

9th Day of Christmas: Evergreen Day



 Evergreen Forest

Evergreen Day has no particular festivities associated with it, so we are left simply celebrating those plants and trees that keep their leaves/needles all winter long.  

Now, I’m the gutter cleaner here at the Cottage On Vine, so I know damn well that our white pine did (alas, she got sick and we removed her) drop quite a load of its needles into our gutters every Fall.  They even turned brown first.  But of course most of them remain to tough out the Winter, as green as green can be.  It really does seem like the evergreens were put here to remind us that, although it is two weeks past Winter Solstice and the daylight hours have only grown 6 mins. 20 secs. in that time, the green of Spring is nevertheless sure to arrive sooner or later.  See—it’s (it was) right there, that evergreen green, in that white pine, in my front yard.  Woo-woo!

Perhaps evergreens remind us, as well, that even Death is not as final as it seems.  

Conversely, I think it’s true that, if we ever find ourselves without any trees that stay green all winter—we’re screwed.  

 In case this does not seem self-evident to you, let me explain:  every organism that goes extinct leaves us all in a more precarious position, because the Environment is a 3-D network of relationships on up and down and between and across the parts of the food chain.  For example, observers have noted that the reintroduction of wolves to the Yellowstone area has strengthened the river ecosystem by limiting the number of elk who strip the riverside vegetation bare in the absence of predators.  Also, wolves eat salmon and then crap this nitrogen-rich food along the river, effectively fertilizing the plants there.  This means that the riverside trees and bushes are more lush, and strong enough to maintain intact the soil by the riverbanks.  The effect is great enough to actually affect the course of the rivers: less erosion means a more meandering course.  That's right: the streams in Yellowstone now have take a more wayward path, thanks to the reintroduction of wolves.

 https://jjraiaphoto.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/meandering-stream-yellowstone.jpg?w=450&h=563

...To lose an organism is to lose the relationship it had, as well, with other organisms.  Picture a tinker-toy structure, or the game Jenga; if you keep removing rods or connectors, the structure becomes less stable, until finally it crashes to the floor.  You can try to replace the spars with some pipe cleaners you had lying around (say, replacing wolves with dogs), but it's not the same; thus, it will pitch, and then collapse.

And I am using the word “extinct” in an inclusive sense; you don’t get to say that a species is not “extinct” if there remains even one living exemplar of it, or thirty.  Even if there were one passenger pigeon left, the bird would be extinct over all of its former range.  By this, more locally relevant definition, I can say that cougar, elk and bison are basically extinct in Illinois—and Kentucky, and Ohio, and Wisconsin, and Michigan, and New York, and Pennsylvania, and…get it?  They used to be everywhere!  And everywhere they used to be, and now are not, is less strong and less fertile as a result of the loss.

A bison herd, recently transplanted to Illinois, part of their former range     
 
Before you accuse me of being Chicken Little, I was reading about how, with more heat and less rain in California, the sequoias are having a harder time pumping water up to their top branches, and so that race of gigantic evergreen tree is endangered by recent climatic changes.  But that’s not the only evergreen tragedy looming…I quote: “the Rocky Mountains in Canada and the United States have seen nearly 70,000 square miles of forest — an area the size of Washington state — die since 2000.”—and this is due to the pine bark beetle, emboldened by higher temperatures to swarm upon and kill forests of pines in unprecedented numbers. 

Pine bark beetle damage in a northern forest
 Those beetles are also one factor in the mass die-off of the forests in the frozen North, but the central cause seems to be warmer temperatures.  And yet we keep puttering around in vehicles and heating our homes—hell, running our entire society—with fuel that adds to the probable cause of those climatic changes: greenhouse gases.  

We could talk about wildfires run amok, too, sending up in literal smoke all those trees we've planted in our guilt.  I wonder how many trees had been planted by our brothers and sisters in Australia?  That country seems destined to end up as one giant field of smoldering charcoal.  We could mention the list of other very disturbing trends vis a vis our dying natural world--but it’s still Christmas, and I don’t want to bum you out too much.  We should be informed, and concerned—but our hope and will to act should remain…evergreen.

New forest after fire
 
I repeat: getting bummed out is not the point.  Celebrating our love for our evergreen neighbors, and sharing that love with our children, is.  So we are lucky that there exists a really easy story to tell to children—and I said tell, not read.  Any adult who knows a few tree species can tell it from memory.  You could call it “How Evergreen Trees Came To Be”:

At the beginning of the world, the Great Mystery had finished creating the trees.  But he wanted to give some of them a gift.  So he told them that, if any of them could go seven days without falling asleep, those who did so would receive a gift.  He did not say what the gift would be, but the trees knew that if it came from the Great Mystery, it had to be good.  And the truth was that the gift was better than anything they could have imagined themselves, but I can’t tell you what it is yet because that’s for the end of the story.  
Well, all the trees resolved to stay awake for all of those seven days, and all of them made it a few days, but after 3 the maples [it’s not necessary to name different deciduous trees here, as I have, but if you know a few you can throw them in] started nodding off, and soon they were all asleep.  On the fourth day, even though all the trees were trying to stay awake by constantly whispering to each other, all the elms and ash trees fell asleep.  On the fifth, the hackberries and mulberries and dogwoods and redbuds fell asleep.  Last to fall asleep before the deadline were the oaks, as we can see when they hold on to many of their brown, dead leaves through the Winter.  But even so the oaks are still asleep then.  Well, after seven days only a few trees were still awake [here name as many evergreens as you know]: the pines, the spruces, the fir trees, the holly trees and bushes, the yew and the juniper all remained awake.
And all received the gift of the Great Mystery, too.  They were delighted to find out that they would stay awake through all of Winter’s cold and dark, staying green no matter how bitter the weather turned.  They would serve as reminders to the world that the sun will always grow stronger and Spring’s green will always return.  The Great Mystery told them that people would take them into their houses and decorate them, or use them to make wreaths.  They would enjoy their living fragrance and fresh color, and it would warm their hearts when Winter threatened  to freeze them solid.   

The End.

…This story is an easy-peezy good bedtime story (since it is not read, no light need be on):
1) some Mythical Figure has a contest to see which trees could stay awake for a certain period of time;
2) all the deciduous trees fall asleep before the end;
3) all the evergreens stay awake and receive the gift of staying green all through Winter;
4) embellish the story at any point, at will.

There is a surprising amount of evergreen musics:

Cliff Richard - Evergreen Tree (Live 1967)
VAN MORRISON ~ Redwood Tree
Roy Orbison - Evergreen
Ryan Adams & The Cardinals - Evergreen
Echo & The Bunnymen - Evergreen
Earth Anthem ~ Dan Fogelberg
Evergreen Boy by SteveForbert
Evergreen - Susan Jacks
Barbra Streisand-Evergreen (theme from "A Star Is Born")
Feeder - You're my evergreen
Ferlin Husky - White Fences and Evergreen Trees
Mott The Hoople Waterlow
Black Crowes- Evergreen
Withering Tree (2010 Remaster) by #Traffic
Ray Charles - This Time Of The Year
Fields of Sun Iron Butterfly
MARMALADE - Lovely Nights
Cat Stevens - King Of Trees
Mostly Autumn - Evergreen
Oh Carolina by #VinceGill
FIGURINES - Drove You Miles
Switchfoot - Evergreen
Evergreen - Dark New Day
"A Marshmallow World" by Dean Martin (Lyrics)
Al Stewart - Feel Like (from "Famous Last Words" - 1993)
Cursive - Northern Winds
Fiery Furnaces - Evergreen
Death Cub For Cutie - Passenger Seat lyrics
Gordon Lightfoot-Knotty Pine
The Last Snowfall-Vienna Teng
Knuckle Puck - Evergreen