On The Feast of Stephen

Page and monarch forth they went,
    Forth they went together;
Through the rude winds wild lament,
    And the bitter weather.

On my perfect December day, something roasts in the oven, an old phonograph spins, candles cast amber light. It is a month for looking in and holding close. A month, as the old Advent carol implores, to trim the hearth and set the table.

But on Boxing Day, on this year the Monday after Christmas, the vineyard beckons. I rouse myself from a slumber fueled by buttery treats and amber ales. Every bone aches to not leave the warmth of home, to not venture south on the road to Canton.

The work this day is drudgery, mounding soil up around protective plastic sleeves I have placed around tender one-year vines. This warm and soggy autumn and winter have left the soil workable even at this late date. The rhythm of spade to soil, the clink of metal on field stone, the tenacious grasp of clover roots.

Plant by plant. Row by row. Slow, deliberate work. Eyes to the ground. Frost tinged clover leaves, clumps of soil. Dig. Churn. Thrust. Mound.

But shovel work is satisfying work. The sound of the spade cutting through turf. The pleasant earthy smell. Wriggling earthworms even still.  The soil is alive, and varied, as I cut across the sloping south vineyard: here clay and waterlogged, there sandy and flecked with smooth river pebbles.

It's the desperate honking of geese, however, that casts my eyes toward the sky. They settle into a perfect vanguard just as they pass overhead. I wonder if they are heading south in a hurry, perhaps realizing this balmy December has bid them stay too long.

Even after the noisy gaggle settles into a silent and perfect wedge across the sky, my eyes linger on the eastern horizon. It is startlingly cerulean, flecked with wisps of cirrus clouds. The words of the old advent carol echo cannily:

People look east, the time is near
Of the crowning of the year

In a month of pulling in and holding close, this is a day to look out. That's what the good king did on this day, which is also the Feast of Stephen. But while he gazed  upon snow, crisp and clear and even, I gaze upon a sloping vineyard planted in a field of clover, with a bright meridian sun casting long shadows.

I look out on gold tipped willow branches cast in sharp contrast to a bright blue sky.

I look out on yellow gables of the old farmhouse against a blue backdrop enlivened by fast floating puffs of white.

I look out on a crested blue heron taking wing from the marsh, rising from tawny grasses and red stemmed branches.

I look out on gently rippling lake waters.

I look out on the old tracks heading south to Canton, and know that once the four o'clock train rumbles by, this brilliant sky, and this startling day, will have passed.

I am thankful for this sky and this vineyard to tend, and these old songs that rattle around my noggin. December often casts a melancholy pall, and sometimes a leaden sky settles overhead around Veterans Day and lingers to well past Easter.

But this winter there have been days of bright sunshine, with the long shadows December casts even at noon.

And I think of Stephen, whose feast is this day, and who at the darkest hour, looked up, and saw the heavens open.

Annibale Carracci
The Martyrdom of St Stephen
1603-04 - Oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre, Paris

A Boxing Day of startling cerulean skies and gently rippling lake waters. A Feast of Stephen that brought me reluctantly out to tend these vines, and rewarded me with a magnificent sky.

All we have to do is remember to look up, and look out, and whether the sky be leaden and the ground sodden, or the horizon brilliant and the clover sweet underfoot, know that eventually the cruel frost and bitter weather of the good king's carol will find us.

But we will take these startling days, and these cerulean skies, and they will become the warm footsteps through the sod, the food and wine we will summon, the pine logs that will warm us, against that cruel weather, which will surely come.

In his master’s steps he trod, where the snow lay dinted;
Heat was in the very sod which the saint had printed.

That is what Boxing Day reminds us, to not just hunker down, but to look out, and up, with gratitude and charity, to make a feast of whatever it is that comes to us, however meager it may seem, knowing that sometimes a heron taking sudden flight from a marsh of brittle grasses may be enough bounty for one day.

Blue Christmas

The legendary Little Blue Santa, of Akron, Ohio

For as long as I can remember, come December my parents screw a blue bulb into the porch light of their small house on Seventh Street.

Other decorations came and went: Wreathes we made in the 70s from cellophane dry cleaner bags. A ribbon around the mailbox. Blinking lights strung along the eaves. Tinsel drapes on the front door junipers.

But the blue bulb is eternal.

I never gave it much thought until someone asked me why.

Folklorist that I am, I string a story together, as I am wont to do.

I recall my Dad's family's simple tree-top star, blue glass with a single bulb in the center, which topped our tree every year until it was more glue than glass.

This was my Grandma Hildegarde's star, whose pride and joy was her silver aluminum Christmas tree, trimmed entirely with blue glass orbs, illuminated by a rotating color wheel on the glass enclosed sunporch of her Ellet retirement home.

I recall my grandma Hildegarde as one who kept Christmas well. She decked the halls, no, well-nigh festooned them, with Victorian Christmas villages, paper honeycomb bells, tinsel, and beads. An intricate handcrafted ornament, her gift to each grandchild. Her elaborate German Christmas cookies, which had to be aged in a paper bag for three weeks with an apple and an orange to reach proper consistency.

I recall our old family nativity, its shepherd with the cracked face, and Mary with her sweet angelic face, clad in a robe of celestial blue, sheltered in a wood hewn manger built by a family member now departed.

I recall my hometown's legendary Blue Santa, a tiny ceramic figure excavated in downtown Akron from an old factory site near the canal, a wise and kindly old elf, clad in blue glazed robes in the German tradition, said to be America's oldest known figure of Saint Nick.

I recall tales of ribald English Christmases of yore, when roving bands of Yuletide revelers might at anytime storm your halls demanding figgy pudding, or worse, in not so polite a manner, and how it is said English Victoria's betrothal to German Albert brought to England the more gentle German fireside Christmas traditions: a tree in the parlor, carols by the fireside, visits from St. Nick, and Luther's gentle lullabies to the Christ child, replacing bawdy English street carols and wassail-fueled debauchery.

I think of my German cobbler great-grandfather, and his shop below the lodge hall on the North Hill of Akron, at Temple Square, and tales of how he kept the shoe store open no matter how deep the snow, and kept a warm fire blazing in the stove in the back room, and how it was said that people came to his shop not so much for shoes as for the hospitality and warmth of the fire.

My great-grandfather, Henry Louis Hosfield, with the Gregory grandchildren. James, my Dad, standing, Grover center, Mickey on his lap.

 I think of my own father's sudden boughts of yuletide merriment, our epic journeys up Smith Road Hill in a raging blizzard, to get something for my Mom's birthday, the longest night of the year. It wasn't just a shopping trip to Polsky's, it was an adventure, and how in the spirit of Hildegarde, but with his own twist, my Dad kept Christmas well.

I think of manning the Jaycees tree lot as a tiny kid with my Dad, downtown Cuyahoga Falls at Broad Boulevard and Front Street when it was a vacant lot, and how we burned scrap lumber in a wooden barrel, and strands of bare bulbs illuminated the offerings, and how we kids gathered branches up off the ground to take home and place in glass Pepsi bottles to make Charlie Brown trees for the dog.

I think of my Dad in his earflap hat and wool coat and corncob pipe, in his element chatting up the tree lot customers, most likely not charging anyone the full retail price, and as Christmas grew close and the night grew late, he gave away more than one tree to the mother with the old coat and the sad eyes, or the family with the rusty car and the dangling muffler.

So, of course in my mind it is a clear trajectory, from Bavaria and O Tannenbaum and Stille Nacht to Akron's North Hill and Blue Santa, and my great grandfather's shoe store at Temple Square, and my grandmother Hildegarde's indominable Christmas spirit, and my Dad's own ways of keeping December festive. It all culminates with the blue bulb in the porch light on Seventh Street.

The 1978 Seventh Street Pageant. My sister, as Mary, of course is in blue. Tim holds Cuddles in her customary role, as a sheep.

 I weave my tale. I connect the dots. I ask my dad, finally, "Why the blue bulb?"

He considers it, for a moment, and says, simply, "Well, because a red bulb looks like a house of ill repute."

I ask my mom the same question. Of course, to her, it is all about the new fallen snow, and how of all the colors of light, it is the blue ones that sparkle on the snow that she has always liked best.

I try out my theory of the blue bulb on both of them, taking it back to Prince Albert and Luther, via Ellet and North Hill and Hildegarde's silver tree with the blue balls, and they both nod affirmatively. Oh, that's a good explanation, too.

So, no matter what the reason, for the better part of the four decades that this house has existed on Seventh Street, which was here as a dirt lane long before they put a number to it and this house sprouted in the side yard of an older one, there has been a blue bulb in the front porch light. It doesn't really matter why. But, if you'd like, I'll weave together a tale.