Odds and Ends

20°f this morning, about -6°C. Bit of red in the sunrise; warming and rain expectedvlater but clear and sunny early on.

Not much exciting going on here.. The past 2 days we spent mostly working on our booths and shopping for oddities like a part for the truck's gas filler tube, little brackets to attach a mirror to a frame, Tylenol PM, hams (99 cents a pound for spiral cut honey ham? Yes thank you. 3 in the freezer now!), and such like. Today, maybe a little Christmas shopping, dinner out, and a play by the local theater group.

Oh, and before I forget, the settlement on the van came in at $2500 MORE than what we paid for it in 2020! So we actually drove it for free for 4 1/2 years. How bizarre is that. We don't have the money yet, still more paperwork to do, but I am on the hunt for a replacement van.

Anyway, on to photos from our snow this week. No real order to them. The snow has mostly gone by now, but it sure was pretty.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Appalachian Christmas Traditions and Superstitions

18°f this morning, about -8°C, clear and frosty.

Wasn't the moon lovely last night? I grabbed a few shots out the truck window as we were returning from town. She looked pretty eerie then, with clouds scuttling by.

Blurry, but I like it. Those spooky dark trees!

Continuing the Christmas theme, some years ago I found a list of Appalachian Christmas superstions on a website called Roadside Theater. The website, or at least the link I had appears to be defunct, so I am glad I had saved this in a document. Most of these seem to have their roots in Celtics traditions. Here are a few from that list. 

Children born on January 6, which is Old Christmas, are said to have special powers for healing the sick. Link is to a post I wrote a while back, which has an interesting story poem included. 

I think we have all heard this one: animals kneel at midnight on Christmas Eve as they did by the manger when Christ was born. They also talk during this time. I remember my boys going to the goat barn once to see if this was true. I believe they came back disappointed.  This poem by Thomas Hardy is one of my favorites this time of year.

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

Certain trees and plants bloom on Christmas Eve. (The legend is probably derived from the English legend of the Glastonbury Thorn. This link takes you to my post about our visit to Glastonbury and the famous tree).

If you sit under a pine tree on Christmas Day you can hear angels sing. But, beware! If you hear them, you’ll be on your way to heaven before next Christmas.

Christmas Day visits to neighbors’ houses require eating a piece of stack cake or mince pie to insure good luck. Visits from twelve neighbors ensure good luck for the whole year – and certainly bring a lot of people closer together.

What is stack cake? Check it out in this link. I have never made one, but maybe I should try it this year?

It is bad luck for a cat to meow on Christmas Day. If it does, evil spirits will visit every day during the coming year. God help us, Clyde meows loudly and often every day!

Coals and ashes from the Christmas fire should never be thrown out that day, and no coal of fire or light should be given away. (The Druids believed that each individual coal represented the spirit of a dearly departed kinsman and that they protected the home during the Yule season.)

A crowing cock on Christmas Eve scares away evil spirits. Shooting off guns and fireworks also works.

Angels are so busy celebrating the birth of Christ that one hour before Christmas the gates of heaven are left unattended. Anyone passing over at this hour has a good chance of sneaking into heaven without having to give account.

To hear the chirp of a cricket on the hearth is a good luck omen for the coming year.

Eating an apple as the clock strikes midnight brings good health.

Single girls who visit the hog pen at midnight on Christmas Eve can find out the kind of man they’ll marry. If an old hog grunts first, she will marry an old man. If a shoat grunts first, her husband will be young and handsome.

Bees hum from dusk until dawn on Old Christmas (January 6). Some say they sing the hundredth Psalm, come out of the hive at midnight, and swarm as they do in summer.

Storytelling was a big part of this dark time of year, and oddly ghost stories were quite the thing. Seems very odd, doesn't it? But this is linked to the idea that the veil between the spirit world and the living world was thinnest at this time. Indeed, people refrained from bringing in greenery until after the Solstice so as not to alert evil spirits to party plans! My mother always waited until Christmas Eve to decorate, as we used a lot of evergreens and vines in our house. The tree wasn't decorated until after midnight. She and Daddy kept some late hours getting it done.

And of course, mistletoe. Larry plans to get me some this weekend from a tree on our property. My bunch from last year is still hung up, supposedly protecting us from evil, fire, and other nastiness. I will burn it on Solstice night. Here's a link to another old post about mistletoe that includes a lot of lore and legend, and another post here that includes a ghost story.

Christmas Day weather forecasts the kind of weather we’ll have for the rest of the year: a warm Christmas foretells a cold Easter; a green Christmas, a white Easter; a windy Christmas means a good corn crop.

Christmas trees must never be removed before January 2; they must be down before Old Christmas on January 6 or bad luck will follow. 

Okay, enough already! Do you have anything to add to this list?

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Appalachian Christmas Carols

Cold, blustery, snowy day yesterday, and temps dropped overnight to 24°f. Brrr. 3" accumulation, but it didn't stick to roads or wet areas. So pretty.

I love Christmas music. I start listening to it right after Thanksgiving and reluctantly put the recordings away at New Year’s. I was surprised to learn, however, that quite a few songs of this holiday season originated or were adapted in our Appalachian mountains. Some are original pieces, others are adaptations of British and Welsh carols that traveled across the ocean with the early settlers. I often sang these and told their history at my Christmas storytelling presentations. What fun those days were! Although honestly,  I am glad to have my December free of the pressure, stress and travel of those days. (I've included a few pics of yesterday's snow, just to liven up all the text.)

One of the most famous Appalachian carols is probably I Wonder as I Wander with its soaring, haunting melody that seems to hold the echo of the mountains. Collected by opera singer and song catcher John Jacob Niles in Murphy, North Carolina in the 1930s, the simple lyrics convey the wonder of a child at story of the birth of Jesus. Niles said that he heard the song, just a couple lines actually, from a young missionary girl named Annie Morgan. He paid her to sing it over and over until he memorized it. Niles probably added some verses himself, and perhaps added some melody lines as well to make a complete song. It remains one of the most touching of the carols sung today. The link takes you to a version by Linda Ronstadt, just impossibly beautiful.

Most people know that Frosty the Snowman was written by Jack Rollins of Keyser, West Virginia. What is not as well known is that Rollins was the breadwinner for his family at a very early age, delivering newspapers and selling magazine subscriptions after his mother went blind from glaucoma. He worked at a variety of jobs, from glassmaking to baggage handler at Penn station in New York, but he eventually quit work to write songs full-time. His first success was Here Comes Peter Cottontail, followed the next year by Frosty. Jimmy Durante sings my linked version, such a classic!

The Cherry Tree Carol is actually an old British ballad that found a new home in the mountains. The words changed slightly, as did the melody. In this carol, Joseph gets angry when Mary asks him to pick some cherries for her, and he suggests that she ask the father of her baby to gather the cherries. The baby Jesus in her womb then tells the tree to bend down so Mary can pick the cherries herself, and Joseph just stands around watching. I can imagine how dumbfounded he was! The tune is light and cheerful, and certainly makes Joseph very human in his anger and perplexity. Judy Collins sings the linked version of this very old song. 

Beautiful Star of Bethlehem was written in a milk barn by a Tennessee farmer named R. Franklin Boyce, the father of eleven children. In such a household it was difficult to find a quiet space to write, so Mr. Boyce would take his pen and paper to the barn. “The words and melody got on my mind,” Boyce once told a reporter, “ till I could hardly sleep at night.” Boyce and his family never collected any royalties for this song, as the practice of those days was for the songwriter to be paid a one-time fee by the publishing company which then owned the rights to the song. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? But his song lives on and continues to brighten the holidays for people around the world. Perhaps that is the best compensation a songwriter could ask for. The Judds sing this carol the very best, in my opinion. Take a listen and see what you think.

One more:  Deck the Halls! According to some researchers, it is believed that this popular song was brought to the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina by Welsh miners. The song was sort of a pass-around song, where one person would sing a line and the next would have to make up a line quickly that rhymed. And if they couldn't, they would just sing falalalala. Eventually the song morphed into the version we know today. True? Or just folklore? No one has been able to prove this story either way.  Sung here by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.