Warm weather brings out old car buffs who love to show off their restoration efforts. Owners will sometimes drive hours just to show off their pride and joy, sometimes then just cruising up and down the Ave.
Tag: Traditions
Did He rise? Hear it, ye nations!
Music written with distinctive shapes for each pitch became a way of training American amateurs to sing harmony in a choir. Fa-so-la plus mi, rather than do-re-mi, for starters. Known as shape-note singing, it led to a distinctive style of hymn performance called Sacred Harp, especially popular in the South. Here’s a bit from the Easter Anthem by colonial New England composer and tanner William Billings. I learned the piece with Mennonites and can attest that shape notes can be so much fun.
Down the tube of time
Native crafts dying as television extends northward: work done at night as people sat around chatting now slips away.
It already happened in Europe long ago.
As for home life?
In case you want one more excuse to celebrate a new year
Just consider:
- New Year’s wasn’t always celebrated on January 1st. The earliest New Year festivities date back about 4,000 years. At that time, the people of ancient Babylon began their new year in what we call March.
- They would have an 11-day festival to acclaim the beginning of spring. It also celebrated that crops were being planted.
- What we use today is known is the Gregorian calendar, introduced 443 years ago by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 as a revised version of the Roman emperor Julian’s version. Gregory declared once and for all that January 1st should be New Year’s Day.
- Since then, most of the Western world marks the start of the year just like you and I do — on the first day of January.
- Still, it took almost 350 years for the world to get on board. Turkey didn’t make the switch until 1927. What was their objection?
- Ours is a solar new year, unlike the ones based on the moon – a lunar (Chinese) or lunisolar new year. The Islamic, Tamil, and Jewish calendars are prime examples of working around the moon. And India and Nepal are among nations that observe the event on a more fluid calendar, so we’re told.
- In Eastern Orthodox countries, January 1 is a religious holiday marking the circumcision of the Baby Jesus, seven days after his birth, rather than the beginning of a new calendar. The Orthodox religious calendar starts on September 1.
- Bulgaria, Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Romania, Syria, and Turkey hold to a revised Julian calendar that observes January 1, but in other nations and locations where the Orthodox churches still adhere to the Julian calendar, including Georgia, Israel, Russia, the Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Ukraine, the civil new year is observed on January 1 while the religious feasts occur on January 14 Gregorian (which is January 1 Julian). Got that?
- Nobody celebrates a new fiscal year, do they? That date can vary, depending on the organization, but for the federal government, it runs from October 1 to September 30.
- And the income tax year, with its April 15 deadline, is a race to the finish line rather than a party.
There’s more, should you be interested. Like Ethiopia on September 11, with its 13-month calendar descending from the Egyptians.
Let’s leave it at that, for now. Instead, you may want to chill the bubbly.
Old Glory in a golden light
A longstanding highlight of Eastport’s annual Old Home Week and Fourth of July festivities is a U.S. naval ship visit. Here is the destroyer DDG 98 Forrest Sherman from last year’s edition as illuminated in glowing late-afternoon sunlight.
To explore related free photo albums, visit my Thistle Finch blog.
Deliberate fire nurtured along
Lowbush blueberries are classified a wild crop, but the barrens where they grow do require tending. One practice involves burning the fields every few years to discourage weeds, shrubs, and trees from taking over.
Spring run in the wild
Swollen by melting snow and ice, forest rivers in Maine were used to float log booms to sawmills or railroads downstream. It’s hard to imagine now, though the tradition involved extensive preparations and skills. This example is the Mattawamkeag River in Aroostook County.
Another day, another year
Here we go again. As if we need an excuse to party and pop bubbly.
- First, let’s be clear. What we’re celebrating is the Gregorian new year, set as January 1 back in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII.
- New Year’s Eve has always been December 31 going back as far as calendars have existed. But the Romans celebrated the New Year on March 1. Because January and February were late additions, the Roman year oringinally ran between March and December.
- Here in the U.S., New Year’s Eve is the most drunken night of the year. The average BAC (blood alcohol content) is reported at .095 percent.
- About 48,700 people are injured in car crashes.
- It’s not the most dangerous holiday for driving. Memorial Day, with 448 fatal accidents, is the worst, followed by Labor Day, the Fourth of July, Columbus Day, Father’s Day, and Cinco de Mayo. Still, with an estimated 408 fatalities, the New Year holiday can be bloody. Christmas, by the way, is the safest.
- Americans hold to their resolutions for 36 days, on average, but 16 percent admit they don’t stick to any of their goals. Some of us don’t make ’em at all.
- “Old Long Syne” is an old Scottish tune that got new words from Robert Burns in 1788. It means “times long past.”
- Canadian bandleader Guy Lombardo is responsible for making it a New Year’s staple. He performed the piece at midnight at a New Year’s Eve party in New York City in 1929 and eventually broadcast it on radio and TV stations around North America.
- Even though it’s become the go-to song every New Year’s Eve, very few people actually know its words. Do you?
- January was not named for the two-faced Roman god Janus but rather originates in the Latin word ianua, meaning door, reflecting the opening of a door we’re about to enter.
There’s still a feast awaiting on this plate
As the calendar year ends, it’s fair to ask What’s Left in your own life as you move on for the next round.
In my novel, the big question is stirred by a personal tragedy, leaving a bereft daughter struggling to make sense of her unconventional household and her close-knit extended Greek family.
In the wider picture, she’s faced with issues that are both universal and personal.
For me, it’s somehow fitting that my most recent work of fiction returns to Indiana, the place where my first novel originated before spinning off into big city subways. The state is also home to more Hodsons than anyplace else in the world, as far as I can see, not that I’ve been back in ages.
What’s Left is one of five novels I’m making available to you for free during Smashword’s annual end-of-the-year sale, which ends January First.
Get yours in the digital platform of your choice, and enter the New Year right.
For details, go to the book at Smashwords.com.
Christmas Eve and our tree’s up
Ours doesn’t come indoors until the day before Christmas and rarely is it decorated before dark. Long ago I learned the price of pushing the tradition to get the job done earlier in the day. Nope, it’s not a task to be done more efficiently.
Last year, we cut ours at Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge with a permit. You’d be amazed how few natural trees measure up. We’d see a good one only to find two growing close together. Separated, they were lobsided and had bald spots. This one caught our eye but we then passed, thinking it might be too open. A mile or two or walking later, we returned and decided to give it a try after all.
Here’s to the wonders of the tradition of sitting in a mostly dark room early morning or evening and enjoying the lighted branches.
Jnana's Red Barn 