The Hammock Papers: Traditions.

01 December 2024

Traditions.

The Field on the ancient traditions of Christmas ...

In the hall of the rambling Elizabethan farmhouse of my childhood was a wide, inglenook fireplace. Every Christmas Eve, the gardener drag-ged in an enormous Yule log, balancing it with much heaving and grunting across the fire dogs. This would be lit by the remaining piece of the previous year’s log and the fire had to burn for the 12 days of Christmas. A roaring log fire when outside all is in the grip of bleak mid-winter and the wind thunders in the chimney is as much a part of Christmas Eve as the tree, the decorations and the holly, ivy and mistletoe. And as with so many of our Christmas traditions, its origins predate Christianity by at least a millennium.

The winter solstice, the shortest day and the longest night, occurs around 21 December and for a period of about a fortnight, our Neolithic ancestors and the Iron Age Celts lit huge bonfires to conquer the darkness and held sacrifices in a desperate plea for the sun to be reborn, bringing its promise of light, warmth, regrowth and fecundity. The tradition of burning a Yule log came to these islands after the collapse of the Roman Empire and the influx of tribes from Scandinavia. An entire tree trunk of oak or ash with the branches lopped off was dragged into the great halls of tribal Saxon chiefs and one end placed in the open fires. The halls were decorated with evergreens, holly, ivy and mistletoe, a custom inherited from the Roman mid-winter festival of Saturnalia, and during the 12 days of feasting to celebrate the return of the sun, the trunk was gradually fed into the fire so that it burnt continuously.

Endless superstitions were attached to it: the sparks spiralling upwards were believed to represent the successful birth of different species of livestock; the ash protected the house from natural disasters and if mixed with water, was a general cure-all for both humans and animals. Difficulty in lighting the Yule log was considered ominous; if the flames cast a person’s shadow without the head, it presaged their death in the coming year and it was a complete calamity for everyone if the fire went out.

Thanks, Buff.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL