daniel deagler's Open Salon Blog

A Marmot named Phil

Mon, 1 Feb 2010 11:02:04 -0500

Unique among the states, Pennsylvania enjoys direct connections to two different national holidays. There is of course the 4^th of July, which was invented in Philadelphia on the 4^th of July. And then there is Groundhog Day in which Punxsutawney; Jefferson County becomes, for one day, the bright shining center of the universe

So…what is Groundhogs Day, why do we celebrate it and where did it come from?

Groundhog’s Day, February 2, occurs on or near the first of the four cross quarter days. A cross quarter day is the halfway point between the solstice and the equinox.

The four cross quarter days are natural times to have feasts and celebrations and our ancient ancestors, pagan and Christian, jumped in with both feet.

What we moderns mostly observe as Groundhog’s Day is traditionally called Candlemas. Candlemas - formally called the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, and/or the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin - was traditionally the day that the priest would bless all the candles to be used in the church for the upcoming year. (The “mas” suffix is Old English and means feast day or celebration: Candlemas = feast of candles.)

The Church is rather adamant that Candlemas has nothing to do with the cross quarter day, and that’s is placement is based on February 2 being the 40^th day after Christmas. According to Mosaic law a woman after giving birth to a son was considered ritually “unclean” for seven days and additionally she would have been required to remain in the “blood of her purification” for another 33 days. It was after that period of 40 days that a woman would attend the temple for a ritual purification. Her son would also be presented there for the first time. (That Mary, of all women, needed “purification” seems somewhat odd and even redundant. Kind of like washing soap.)

Yet there are skeptics who rightly point out that if the church superimposed it’s own February 2 feast on top of an existing pagan ritual it wouldn’t be the first time.

And before Candlemas there was indeed the Celtic festival of Imbolc (pronounced IM olk) meaning “in the belly,” as in a pregnant ewe, but also symbolic of the earth right before spring. It is associated with the goddess Brigid - who became transmuted into St. Brigid and whose feast day is February 1. Imbolc was much concerned with fertility and and the coming of spring. According to Gaelic folklore the hag goddess Cailleach would gather firewood on Imbolc. If she intended to prolong winter she would make the day bright and sunny the better to gather more firewood. If Imbolc turned out mean and overcast it meant that Cailleah was asleep in her den and that there would be an early spring. Sound familiar?

Most Groundhog’s Day reference sources site this bit of Scottish verse:

If Candlemas be fair and bright,
winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
winter will not come again.

Our modern Groundhog’s Day traditions are from the German’s who settled Pennsylvania. Their Candlemas traditions had a badger as weather forecaster; finding no badgers they substituted a groundhog. ("Groundhog" and "Woodchuck" are interchangeable names for a large ground squirrel known as a marmot.) The earliest known reference is from the Berks County Historical Society. On February 4, 1841, James Morris, a storekeeper in Morgantown wrote in his diary, “Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate.”

In 1887, Clymer H. Freas, editor of the Punxsutawney Spirit Newspaper in came up with the idea of a "Punxsutawney Groundhog Club." Although the original members were at first concerned with hunting and eating the little fellas, Mr. Freas reintroduced the Candlemas tradition of weather prognostication. It was he who gave Punxatawney Phil his name and set him and his little town on the road town to greatness.The Punxsutawney Spirit is still in print and a large ground squirrel named Phil is Punxsutawney's first citizen and the worlds most famous weatherman.

Jolly Old St. Nick and the battle for Christmas

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:12:16 -0500

Every year excitable people get their undergarments in knots worried that nefarious forces are at war with Christmas. It’s as much a modern tradition as inflatable lawn reindeer. But according to Steven Nissenbaum in his book “The Battle for Christmas” every generation feels that the holiday they celebrate is less pure and less true that it had once been in some more noble time. In truth, ever since Christians started observing Christ’s birth on December 25 – which was at least as early as AD 354 - there has always been a battle for the soul of the holiday.

The December 25 Christmas was built upon the ashes of the Roman festival Saturnalia. Saturnalia was a winter solstice observation characterized by excessive eating, excessive drinking, and excessive…other activities. Throughout the centuries it was very difficult to divorce these Bacchanalian practices from the season of Christ’s nativity. It was in the very nature of the month of December itself, according to Nissenbaum that encouraged this bawdry behavior. “The deep freeze of midwinter had not yet set in; the work of gathering the harvest and preparing it for winter was done; and there was plenty of newly fermented beer or wine as well as meat from freshly slaughtered animals – meat that had to be consumed before it spoiled.” In December, the table was set for a party.

In the middle ages a social contract developed between lords of the manor and their peasants. At Christmas, in the guise of minstrels and wassailers, the lower orders could demand of there social betters hospitality and hand outs in exchange for a performance, one that was invariably unwelcome and forced upon them. These revelers were variously known as wassailers, Christmas Waits, and Mummers depending on the specifics of the performance, but all used the implied threat that if their loud drunken demonstrations of good cheer for the health and good fortune of the rich folks inside we're not met with rewards of food and drink, unfortunate things might happen.Wassailing was like trick-or-treating but with teeth.

Variations on this existed at least into the nineteenth century and became a threat to civil order and private property. It was at that time that a group of New York gentleman took it upon himself to try and tame Christmas once and for all by getting it off the street and into the parlor.

First was Washington Irving, who was very much enamored and bemused by the original Dutch settlers of New York and through the art of what British historian Eric Hobsbawn calls "invented tradition" claimed the “Dutch” St. Nicholas (the real St. Nicholas, Nicholas of Myra was an Anatolian Greek) as a New Yorker and the patron saint of that city. Irving’s friend, John Pintard, who was very displeased at the raucous way Christmas was celebrated, sought to copy the real Dutch practice of giving of presents to children – ostensibly from St. Nicholas – first on St. Nicholas Day (December 6) as was the Dutch practice but later shifting it to Christmas. A third friend, Clement Clark Moore wrote the poem that would change everything: “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in 1822. It was Moore who gave Santa his named reindeer and the down-the-chimney means of entrance to the homes of people all nestled and snug in their beds. A generation later, a fourth New Yorker, the brilliant political cartoonist Thomas Nast, fleshed out Santa even more making him a toy maker with a North Pole address.

The warm friendly domestic Santa was immediately embraced by merchants who were more than happy to sell to their customers all that was needed to plan for the perfect Christmas centered on the home. As commerce became more sophisticated and name brands started to appear at the turn of the 20^th century, Santa was enlisted to sell even more products. In the 1920s, world-class artists like N.C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell painted Santa for the cover of publications like the Saturday Evening Post and Country Gentleman. And in 1931 the Coca-Cola Company hired Haddon Sunblom to paint a series of ads featuring Santa to show that Coke was not just a warm weather drink. It was Sunblom who created the enduring and definitive image of Santa that we know today: full grown man not elf, full red suit with white trim, seriously jolly.

In many ways it is at Santa’s feet that we can lay blame to how commercial Christmas has become. Santa’s Christmas is about Christmas morning and presents under the tree. Unless you have a factory staffed by elves, presents require shopping. Christmas today tilts more towards the giving and the getting than the Gospel of St. Luke. So be it. But it was Santa -and a handful of New York gentlemen - who wrestled the great holiday away from the drunks and gave it to the children. The Christmas we know and that we bequeath to our children is Santa’s Christmas and that’s the greatest gift we ever got from jolly old St. Nick.

The Thanksgiving Lady

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:11:19 -0500

The Thanksgiving Lady

Daniel Deagler

Sarah Josepha Hale

Philadelphia has more than its share of holiday connections: The Fourth of July, Flag Day, and Mother’s Day were all born in the City of Brotherly Love. You might want to add Thanksgiving. What? Impossible! What connection does the quintessential New England holiday of Pilgrims, turkeys, and pumpkin pie have with Philly other than perhaps the fact that Gimbels created the first Thanksgiving Day parade here in 1920, four years before Macy’s?

The answer is, more than you think and all because of the tireless efforts of an extraordinary woman whose name ought to be much more famous than it is. Sarah Josepha Hale was arguably the most influential American woman of the 19^th century. As the editor of the Philadelphia-based publication, Godey’s Ladies Book, Mrs. Hale was that era’s ultimate arbiter of taste, style, and etiquette -- the Victorian version of Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart and Rachel Ray all rolled into one.

Born in Newport, New Hampshire in 1788, Sarah Josepha Hale ended up becoming a person of consequence out of necessity. She found herself widowed with five children in 1822. With the financial help of some of her late husband’s Freemason lodge brothers she was able to self-publish a book of poems called The Genius of Oblivion. In 1830 she published a collection of verse, Poems for Our Children, that included one called “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” She also wrote a novel called Northwood: A Tale of New England, in which one of the characters laments, "We have too few holidays. Thanksgiving, like the Fourth of July, should be considered a national festival and observed by all our people . . . as an exponent of our Republican institutions."

The success of these literary endeavors inspired the Rev. John Blake to offer Mrs. Hale the editorship (she preferred the term “editress”) of his Boston based Ladies Magazine, a job she held from 1828 to 1836. Louis A. Godey, a rival publisher in Philadelphia who had his own magazine, Godey’s Ladies Book, coveted SJH the way George Steinbrenner now covets Cliff Lee, and ended up buying the Boston Ladies Book, first renaming it American Ladies Magazine but quickly merging it into his own monthly. Godey allowed SJH to edit the combined magazines from Boston until her son graduated from Harvard. She then moved to Philadelphia. It is not what Sarah Josepha Hale found in Philadelphia that inspired her life’s great quest, but what she didn’t find. She didn’t find Thanksgiving.

New Englanders loved their Thanksgiving, and for good reason. When Sarah wrote, "We have too few holidays,” she wasn’t kidding. Puritan New Englanders of her era had exactly three: Washington’s Birthday, the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving.” They certainly didn’t celebrate Christmas, which they considered to be a popish/pagan abomination. The holiday that became our Thanksgiving evolved in New England in the late 17^th century into a sort of acceptable Puritan substitute for Christmas, combining elements of that holiday –family celebration, big dinner - with customs remembered from the old English autumn festival Harvest Home, as well as generous dollops of the Pilgrim cook out with the Wampanoag Indians at Plymouth in 1621 blended with the separate “thanksgiving” called for by Governor Bradford in 1623. (To the Pilgrims, a true thanksgiving would have been a day of fasting, not feasting.)

Thanksgiving had already existed in New England in much the same form for about 150 years by the time Sarah used a two-prong attack to promote a nationally observed holiday. First, she utilized the power of her magazine. The November issue of Godey’s would year in year out be filled with stories, recipes, engravings, illustrations, poems, decorating ideas and advice on how to plan for the perfect Thanksgiving. Sarah presented it as though it already existed and created in the minds of American homemakers a desire they didn’t know they had.

Second, she embarked on a 17 year letter writing campaign to US governors and to five American presidents: Zachary Taylor, Millard Filmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. She finally succeeded with Lincoln in 1863 when her needs intersected his. In 1863, the year of Gettysburg and in November of 1863, the Gettysburg Address, national unity was very much on the president’s mind. On October 26, 1863, Abraham Lincoln invited his fellow citizens “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

(Needless to say, the Thanksgiving holiday did not catch on right away in the South.)

In addition to giving us Thanksgiving and Mary had a Little Lamb, Sarah Josepha Hale was a prime mover in the building of the Bunker Hill Monument in Boston, and in the preservation of George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate.

Mrs. Hale died at her Locust St. Philadelphia home in 1879 at the age of 90 and is buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery on Ridge Avenue.

On this Thanksgiving maybe some of our thanks could be saved for the extraordinary lady who did so much to give us the quintessential American holiday.

How the Irish invented Hallowe'en

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:10:25 -0400

Daniel Deagler

The other week I saw in a suburban Philadelphia newspaper a letter to the editor complaining about Hallowe'en and how far that holiday had fallen from its original purpose. The

Rev. Thomas Duffy, a catholic priest, of Warminster, PA wrote: "On the eve of the Christian feast honoring the saints on November 1, children would dress in the attire of a favorite saint and celebrate that person's heroism. That custom has disintegrated to something far less worthy, to say the least."

I laughed aloud when I read it as years before I had heard that same origin story from the Sisters of St. Joseph, who were my teachers back at St. Athanasius in Philadelphia. I no longer remember if I accepted that creative explanation as a 1^st grader in 1964 (I probably did) and in retrospect I certainly can't blame the sisters for giving it a good try. But dressing up as your favorite saint is definitely not where the customs of Hallowe'en originated.

Long before the Gospels reached the lands of Father Duffy's (and my) forebears, the Celts observed the festival of Samhain (pronounced SOW-in) at the cross-quarter day (halfway point) between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. Samhain was a celebration of the harvest and a transition into the dark half of the year. The ancient Celts divided the year between the “dark” and “light” halves, with November the beginning of the dark half and the de-facto Celtic New Year. It was observed with bonfires, feasting, and games along with a certain amount of trepidation, as Samhain was not just a festival of the harvest but also a festival of the dead.

It was during Samhain that the veil between the living and the dead was thought to be the most transparent, a time when spirits of the departed and inhabitants of the “fairy realm” walked abroad in the world and interacted with the living. At Samhain one was never sure whether a stranger encountered on the road was a person or something else. It was thus in one's self interest to treat with hospitality any stranger knocking on their door at Samhain.

The Catholic Church, unlike iconoclastic groups from the Puritans to the Taliban, often sought to succeed rather than obliterate indigenous customs by overlaying Christian rituals and symbols overtop pagan ones. The Celtic cross combines the pagan symbol of the sun with the cross of the living Christ. Gods and goddesses were transmuted into saints. Saturnalia and other winter solstice observations evolved into Christmas. The cross-quarter day festival Imbolc (February 2) became Candlemas.

In 835 Pope Gregory III established November 1 as the Feast of All Saints, or All Hallows (meaning "all holy.")The Feast of All Souls, November 2, was added officially in the 14th century. These two days along with the day preceeding the Feast of All Hallows, called All Hallows Eve or Hallowe'en (a contraction of "Hallow Evening") made up what was called the Hallowtide. Customs of Hallowtide combined harvest celebrations with praying for the souls in purgatory. Because both Hallowtide and Samhain were about veneration for the dead, they were a reasonably good fit. During the Hallowtide children would go door to door begging for little cakes made of oatmeal and molasses called “soul cakes.”

After the Reformation, Protestants had no need for venerating saints or praying for souls whose salvation they believed were already predetermined. Those parts of Europe that remained both Celtic and Catholic, specifically Ireland but also parts of Britain, carried on the customs of Samhain/Hallowe'en that would eventually cross the Atlantic with them to America. It was in the New World that the Hallowe'en revelers found something without which our modern celebration would be unthinkable: the pumpkin. (The original jack-o’-lantern was a hollowed out turnip.)

Hallowe'en today, in spite of its name, is not a "holy evening."But nor is it the devil's dance party. The mysterious travelers of the night are children and they are as likely to be attired as princesses and Power Rangers than as ghosts and goblins. If the 31st of October is not about venerating the saints there are plenty of other days in the year to do so - November 1st, for example.

We should remember that many things make up our cultural heritage. Our alphabet is Roman and our numeric system Arabic. Four of the seven days of the week are named after Nordic gods. January, March, May and June are named for Greek and Roman ones, Pagan customs surround us every day and this is especially true during holidays, whose roots go much deeper than we might be aware. Anyone who disagrees can tell me what exactly the Christmas tree or the Easter egg have to do with Jesus of Nazareth.

Irish stew and ragu

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:03:55 -0400

Daniel Deagler

The first St. Patrick’s Day celebration in America took place in Boston in 1737. It was organized by the Charitable Irish Society of Boston, a Protestant group founded that year to help needy (Protestant) Irishmen. Although there are few counties in New England today where Catholics do not make up a majority of the population, from it’s founding in 1620 to the middle of the eighteenth century (230 years), New England was an exercise in Calvinist self rule. Anglicans and Quakers were not particularly welcome, let alone Papists. This changed dramatically in 1845, and the reason for the change is the lumper.

The lumper is a type of potato. It is a waxy potato, meaning it’s low in starch, and is not considered particularly good tasting. Its value is that it produces high yields. This is why the Irish enthusiastically embraced it when it was introduced into Munster around 1810, from whence it spread quickly to the entire island. (Potatoes are not native to Ireland; they come from the Andes Mountains of South America.) 70% to 90% of the Irish potato crop was planted in lumpers when a blight, called Phytophthora infestans, killed off the lumpers in the years 1845 to 1849. The resulting famine killed twenty-five percent of the Irish population – one million people – and forced another million to emigrate. Most came to America and their arrival profoundly changed America. The Irish poured themselves into a soup that had previously consisted only of Protestants from a handful of northern European countries. They changed the American broth into a stew.

Unlike other immigrant groups, the Irish did not fan out to farm and ranch the vast American wilderness. They settled in cities and to this day the highest concentrations of Americans who consider themselves predominantly Irish are in the cities and suburbs of America’s largest eastern and mid-western cities. The Irish were settled in the slums and tenements when the second great wave of immigration, this time from southern and eastern Europe, arrived at the turn of the twentieth century.

One of the most peculiar shotgun weddings in American history was the accidental coupling of Irish and Italian immigrants into neighborhoods, schools and, most importantly, church. Although the Irish and Italians frequently had their own parishes, their common Catholicism threw these disparate peoples together. Neither party was thrilled with the arrangement. Except for their Catholic faith they had nothing in common, and even that was perceived differently within the two groups.

The Irish came from a place – northern Europe – where everybody but them had abandoned the old faith, and they suffered for it. Their faith was their identity, the thing that made them what they were. Irish Catholicism was the Church Militant. The Italians came from a place – southern Europe - where Catholicism was the default religion: the pope was Italian and the Church an Italian institution. In their Catholicism was found the greatest art and music of Western Civilization, the genius of the Renaissance. Italian Catholicism was the Church Triumphant.

Because of their fifty-year head start it was the Irish who formed and shaped the institutional Catholic Church in America. Their strength in numbers in the cities allowed the Irish to exploit the political system, and Irishmen swelled the ranks of the big city police and fire departments and every other municipal agency. And St. Patrick’s Day became the granddaddy of all ethnic holidays in America.

The Italians especially resented the domination of the Irish. Today Irish-Italian rivalry is mostly good-natured and light-hearted, something done across the table at the Knights of Columbus, and many thousands of Americans share both ancestries. But it was not always so, especially when the Irish in power did all they could to keep the Italians out of it. The Italians also believe, not without justification, that theirs is the superior culture. (Think “Irish cuisine,” an oxymoron if there ever was one.)

And St. Patrick’s Day puts them right over the edge. From their perspective only on St. Patrick's Day are so many so proud of so little. Ask an Italian if he or she is going to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and the most polite answer you’ll get is, “Please….” Less polite answers will sound like dialogue from the Sopranos.

On March 17th, African-Americans and South Asians, Jews, Japanese, and Mexicans will join the Irish in wearin’ of the green. Pisans? Not so many.

Daniel Deagler is a letter carrier for the US Postal Service. He is three quarters Irish.