Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Christmas Traditions

Epiphany Music Christmas Traditions

I can hardly hear myself think, with twelve drummers drumming!

While I am generally all for extending Christmas for as long as possible, we have come finally to the twelfth day, the Feast of the Epiphany, and the official close of the season. At least in the West. For the Orthodox, today is Christmas Eve.

For the rest of us, this is traditionally the day to take down the Christmas tree and all the festive decorations and to let the tree spirits go about their business. Our wise forebears believed that it is bad luck to take down the decorations earlier. Taking them down later is equally unlucky, so that if you miss the date, you’re supposed to leave everything up for the rest of the year. Ignore this advice at the peril of your crops! (If you ask me, the bylaws need to me emended to include a clause against putting out decorations before Thanksgiving.)

I hope La Befana, the Christmas witch, was good to you and that you’re not one of those nuts who pounds a drum in frigid water. I’d rather climb out of a warm bed to find a gift in my shoe.

In case you missed it yesterday, here again is the last section of Respighi’s tone poem “Feste Romane” (“Roman Festivals”), titled “La Befana.” It’s often given in English as “Epiphany,” but it’s really named for the Christmas witch, whom Italians embrace as part of their January 6 celebrations.

However you choose to celebrate, I hope your Epiphany is a festive one!

Who likes it when Merlin shows up in the Christmas story? We all do, of course!

One of my favorite Christmas pieces is Rutland Boughton’s “Bethlehem,” a choral drama adapted from the 14th century Coventry Nativity Play. Composed in 1915, and written very much in the English pastoral idiom, the work incorporates settings of familiar carols, such as “O come, all ye faithful” and “The Holly and the Ivy.”

Taking a page from Richard Wagner, Boughton composed a cycle of five operas on Arthurian themes and started a Glastonbury Festival, in the style of Bayreuth. Alas, neither the operas nor the festival, as it was originally conceived, have endured.

In Boughton’s “Bethlehem,” the shepherds bear gifts of a penny whistle, a hat, and a pair of warm mittens. The Three Wise Men hobnob with Herod, Zarathustra, and, yes, Merlin. If you gravitate toward the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, you’re bound to fall under the work’s disarming spell.

For years, I was unable to share any audio from the piece, due to Hyperion Records’ justifiably Draconian practice of not allowing any its recordings on YouTube. But the company is now in other hands, so here it is, finally, as a playlist – albeit with the tracks posted separately, so prepare to have to skip an occasional ad.

BONUS! “March of the Three Holy Kings” from Franz Liszt’s “Christus”

Epiphany traditions from around the world

https://matadornetwork.com/read/epiphany-celebrations-around-world/

IMAGES: (top) Detail from Edward Burne-Jones’ “Adoration of the Magi;” (left to right) Twelfth Night holly man; banging the drum in Bulgaria; and Befana the Christmas witch

January 6, 2025
Iceland’s Yule Lads The Christmas Trolls

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, but if you didn’t put a shoe in your window last night, you are in for a world of irritation through Christmas. Oh, wait a minute, that’s probably the case anyway.

The Yule Lads are Iceland’s greatest metaphor for holiday annoyance and frustration. In their most anodyne form, the Lads leave gifts for children (in the shoe). But in their purest, most primordial sense, they are major pains in the ass. And their mother will kill you.

Today, the Lads are most frequently portrayed as a bevy of affable Santa Clauses, rewarding the good with welcome gifts and penalizing the naughty with rotten potatoes. But in days of yore, they were amoral pranksters and homicidal trolls who devoured children.

According to Icelandic lore, the Lads are thirteen in number. Mostly they harass and steal from Icelandic farmers. They descend from the mountains, staggering their arrivals and departures, beginning thirteen nights before Christmas. For those who can’t be bothered to do the math, that would be December 12.

Each has his own exasperating speciality, whether it be harassing sheep, stealing milk, eating crust out of pans, licking spoons, stealing leftovers, licking bowls, slamming doors, eating skyr (a kind of Icelandic yogurt), stealing sausages, peeping through windows, sniffing for bread, stealing meat with a hook, or eating candles.

For Tolkien fans, surely the Lads are the basis for the thirteen Dwarves [sic] who visit Bilbo Baggins, eating him out of house and home and imperiling his dishes.

Their mother is the ogress Grýla, who seeks children to boil in her cauldron. If you happen to find yourself in her gnarled claws, remember, she has to release you if you repent!

The Yule Lads are frequently accompanied by Jólakötturinn, the Yule Cat. The cat eats those who don’t receive new clothes before Christmas. This is tied in to the Icelandic work ethic. In the old days, if farm hands processed their autumn wool in a timely fashion, they were rewarded with new garments. If not, they received nothing, thereby leaving them vulnerable to the Yule Cat. Better sheer them sheep!

In 1746, the practice of parents tormenting their children with Christmas monster stories was officially banned.

Get festive in the way only Icelanders can, with these “Icelandic Folk Dances” by Jón Leifs.

Björk sings about the Yule Cat

Only 13 days of folklore and paganism until Christmas!

PHOTO: Jólakötturinn is watching

December 12, 2023
Twelfth Night: Traditions, Music, and Befana the Witch

Once they have sufficiently recovered from New Year’s, a lot of people take down their Christmas lights and dismantle their trees. (On the other hand, too many seem to leave them up until spring.) After all, Christmas is past, right? Wrong!

January 5, the eve of Epiphany, is Twelfth Night – the Twelfth Day of Christmas – or is it? Well, it depends on when you start the count. Is Christmas Day the First Day, or should we begin counting the day after? The day after would make January 6, Epiphany (the Christian feast commemorating the visit of the three Magi to the Baby Jesus), the Twelfth Day, which would seem to make sense.

But is Epiphany the Twelfth Day, or should Twelfth Night, a night of reveling to mark the last day of Christmas, really to be observed on the eve of Epiphany, just as Christmas Night, in England anyway, is actually Christmas Eve? The Christian world is divided – and that is only taking into account the West!

Then there’s “Old Twelfth Night” (January 17), but that’s for another post.

In any case, according to tradition, it’s perfectly fine to still have the tree and lights up, but it is bad luck to keep Christmas decorations on display beyond Epiphany. Apparently it was the Victorians who first said so, as a signal that it’s time for everyone to get back to work. The Tudors, on the other hand, kept partying right on through February 1, the eve of Candlemas (the presentation of the Christ Child at the Temple in Jerusalem).

As for Shakespeare’s play, “Twelfth Night,” which would seem to have nothing at all to do with Christmas, it is a charming corollary of a season of merriment, masked balls, and misrule. The first performance took place on Candlemas, 1602.

We may not be able to come to a consensus on the Twelfth Day, but we can say with certainty that the night of January 5 marks the arrival of Befana, the Christmas witch. Befana is the wizened crone who bestows gifts and happiness upon the good children of Italy. If the children are bad, they get a lump of coal. (If the family is poor, they get a stick.) It’s traditional to leave a glass of wine and a tasty morsel for Befana. In return, she will sweep the floors with her broom, symbolically sweeping away the problems of the old year.

Think about that when you worry that your tree is losing too many needles.

Johan Wagenaar, “Twelfth Night Overture”

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, “Twelfth Night Overture”

Glenn Gould, “Twelfth Night: Incidental Music”

Samuel Barber, “Twelfth Night”

Henry Purcell, “If music be the food of love”

Sir Thomas Morley, “O mistress mine”

Erich Wolfgang Korngold, “O mistress mine”

Roger Quilter, “O mistress mine”

Amy Beach, “O mistress mine”

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, “The rain, it raineth everyday”

PHOTO: Make way for the Holly Man!

January 5, 2022
Venezuelan Christmas Traditions & Culture

As Americans, our concept of Christmas tends to be rather Northern-centric. Even the practice of calling ourselves “Americans” is a bit presumptuous, seeing as there are all these other folks living around the Equator and in lands south – roughly 40 percent of the population of the Eastern Hemisphere – who are also Americans, though not citizens of the United States.

The people of Venezuela may never know what it is to enjoy a white Christmas, but they have developed their own seasonal traditions to compensate for a lack of “dashing through the snow.” On Christmas Day in the capital city of Caracas, the streets are closed to traffic, fireworks shatter the silence before dawn, and those youngsters who can sleep through anything are awakened by a tug on the toe.

Children go to bed on Christmas Eve with a string tied to their piggies. One end is dangled out the window to be tugged – gently, one would hope – by passersby, as a reminder that it is time to get up and strap on the skates. For in the city of Caracas, it is customary for anyone who is able-bodied to roller skate to Christmas Mass. If the kids are good, they have received gifts in the night, not from Santa, but from Baby Jesus himself.

After Mass, everyone goes out for tostados and coffee. The big meal is enjoyed on Christmas Eve (actually the wee hours of Christmas morning), following Midnight Mass, or Misa de Gallo. “Gallo,” if you don’t know, is Spanish for “rooster.” Nobody gets any sleep on Christmas in Venezuela. That’s one aspect of the holiday Americans in both hemispheres pretty much share in common.

A Venezuelan favorite: “Mi Burrito Sabanero” (“My Little Donkey of the Savannah”)

December 24, 2021
Gävle Goat The Burning Christmas Tradition

I’ve been following the Gävle Goat’s Twitter feed, half dreading, half hoping for disaster, since Thanksgiving. I kid you not.

One of Northern Europe’s wackier Christmas traditions – no doubt with pagan roots – the Yule Goat may have derived from the worship of Thor. After all, the God of Thunder’s chariot was drawn by two goats. The Christmas version of the goat is led about by Saint Nicholas, possibly as a symbol of the subjugation of evil.

Whatever the goat’s function, it goes way back. For hundreds of years, rowdy young men in costumes would go door to door to enact plays and demand gifts. One of these, naturally, was the ornery Yule Goat. Scandinavians sometimes refer to the practice of wassailing as “going Yule Goat.”

In the 19th century, the Goat’s role was transformed into a giver of gifts. Though the Goat has since been replaced by a humanoid Father Christmas, in Finland he is still referred to by the name Joulupukki (need I say, Yule Goat?).

Nowadays, the Goat is mostly seen in its incarnation as a miniature tree ornament, made of straw and bound by red ribbon. A notable exception is the Gävle Goat – erected annually in Castle Square, Gävle, Sweden – which is basically that ornament, only on the grandest of scales (i.e. 40-feet tall). The Gävle Goat is constructed over a period of two days, just in time for Advent.

Then begins an unsanctioned game of cat-and-mouse, with the authorities attempting to guard the Goat, while everyone else attempts to light it off. Yes, you read that correctly. If the Goat is burned to the ground before December 13 (St. Lucia’s Day), it is rebuilt.

Over the years, the Goat has been rammed by a Volvo, damaged by fireworks, stomped to pieces, fired upon with flaming arrows (launched by vandals dressed as Santa and gingerbread men), and torched by a hapless American who was talked into using his lighter by Swedes who convinced him it was a perfectly legal holiday tradition. (It’s not.) In 2010, there was even a failed plot to abduct the goat by helicopter.

2016 was the last year the goat went up in flames, set ablaze within hours of construction. The catastrophe was timed to coincide with a security guard’s bathroom break. The most recent attempt was in 2018, but the Goat sustained only minor damage to its front left leg.

But there is also a smaller, companion goat, in the same park, which stands only about 7-feet tall. In 2019, just after I stopped checking, apparently the “kid” got singed. Nevertheless, this is the first time the larger Goat survived for more than two years in a row.

You’ll find more information and a complete history of the Gävle Goat’s destruction here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A4vle_goat

Excellent time-lapse burning of the Goat:

Yule Got Your Goat

Follow the Goat’s twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/Gavlebocken…

View the live webcam:

https://www.visitgavle.se/en/gavlebocken

And to keep it musical, here’s a Christmas song by Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén:

Anyone care to start a pool?

December 14, 2020

Tag Cloud

RECENT POSTS