Well, it is the premise of this blog. For the record, a lot of our junk was stored under this floor, though this barn in York, Maine, was never ours.
Tag: Traditions
Cranberries!
Not everybody loves them, but they are a Thanksgiving tradition, jellied or stewed or otherwise.
Here’s some background.
- They’re one of the few fruits native to America.
- They don’t grow in water but the berries do float, which is how many of them are harvested, starting with a machine called an eggbeater.
- They also bounce.
- Only five percent are sold fresh. And eating one raw will be unpleasantly tart.
- Americans consume 400 million pounds of cranberries a year – roughly a pound and a half per person – a fifth of that during Thanksgiving week. How do you measure up?
- A gallon of juice requires 4,400 berries. Did we mention it’s a great antioxidant and high in Vitamin C?
- The “Sex in the City” TV series in the 1990s boosted the popularity of the Cosmopolitan cocktail, which features cranberry juice and vodka. Well, there’s a classic version with gin instead. Cosmos are typically served in martini glasses, after all.
- I’m quite fond of Craisins, the dried berry version that goes nicely in green salads and yoghurt, at the top of my list.
- Seven out of every ten cranberries sold in the world today come from Ocean Spray, a farmer-owned cooperative with more than 700 grower-families.
- Wisconsin is the leading producer in the U.S., followed by Massachusetts. A few are even grown here in Downeast Maine.
Turkeys in the wild
Here’s how they look much of the rest of the year around here. And there are a lot of them who surprisingly disappear this time of the year.
To the north
Miles between houses in dense forest
Irving
Wood
Lands
Grange halls falling into disuse
Superb sea chantey singer
As you can see, Stephen Sanfilippo is more than a maritime historian. He can sing his research findings. Small concerts like this one upstairs at the Pembroke public library are one of the delights of living Way Downeast.
The Metropolitan Opera broadcasts take on a new tone
One of the benefits of donating even a modest amount to the Metropolitan Opera’s broadcast fund is that you receive an annual schedule booklet, 36 colorful, glossy pages with the casts, broadcast times and estimated lengths, and summaries of the plots. The booklet arrives a month or two before the next season begins, and I keep mine as wonderful future references.
The upcoming Saturday matinee broadcasts, which start airing on Dec. 9, have already been controversial, due to the company’s shifting focus toward increased contemporary and sometimes realistically gritty works. The first presentation of the season, in fact, is Florencia en el Amazonas, inspired by the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and only the third Spanish-language opera to be performed at the Met. (Carmen, after all, is in French and will be heard on Jan. 27.) Other works from our own era are Dead Man Walking (Jan. 20), X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (Feb. 3), Fire Shut Up in My Bones (April 27), John Adams’ opera-oratorio El Nino (May 4), and The Hours (May 18).
That unprecedented string of operas by living composers doesn’t mean the usual masters aren’t on the menu. Mozart (3), Wagner, Verdi (4), Puccini (3), Bizet, Gounod, Donizetti, Johann Strauss Jr., and Gluck are all in the lineup, with two of the dates yet to be announced. Conspicuously absent is Richard Strauss.
Two of the archived presentations feature my favorite-ever conductor, Max Rudolf: Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro on Dec. 30, with Victoria de los Angeles and Cesare Siepi, and Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore on April 6, with Luciano Pavarotti, Judith Blegen, and Ezio Flagello. As one conductor once told me, Rudolf could have been famous, if he had wanted that. At the Met, he worked largely behind the scenes as Rudolf Bing’s artistic administrator before going to Cincinnati and rebuilding that city’s great orchestra.
Also of note is that the long-running broadcast series has a new sponsor, the Robert K. Johnson Foundation, only the third in its history. The series was underwritten by Texaco from 1940 to 2003, followed by Toll Brothers luxury homebuilders (2005 to 2023).
Gee, have Texaco’s red-star gas stations been gone from the landscape 20 years already?
Even tradition changes.
Doodling around with the origins of ‘Yankee’
The label does have a range of applications, from residents of the six-state New England region or Connecticut in particular to a Manhattan professional baseball team to anyone north of Dixie (often prefaced with “damn”) to anyone from the USA who lands in a foreign country.
Along with the shortened “Yank.” Or its many uses as an adjective.
The word’s origins, though, are contested.
- The earliest recorded use is credited to British General James Wolfe in 1758 when he complained about the Americans under his command. The British continued to use it in a derogatory fashion. The pompous fools.
- A largely dismissed theory had it arising in a French word for English-speaker that the Wyandot rendered into Y’an-gee.
- Another had it being adopted when New Englanders defeated a Native tribe who had identified themselves as Yankoos – meaning invincible. Problem there is the tribe must have been invisible all along.
- More likely is a derogatory Dutch-language origin in the early 1600s through New Amsterdam, beginning with the name Jan, for John, pronounced Yan. One theory has Jan being applied to any Dutch-speaking English colonist, a kind of winking acknowledgement that they could converse. How about having it originate among those Dutch-speaking Englishmen? I haven’t seen that suggestion before.
- Or it may have been imported from the Old World as Jan Kaas, “John Cheese,” a generic nickname the Flemish had for Dutch in the north.
- Or Jan might have been combined with another popular Dutch name, Kees, into Yankee, as English-speakers turned it against the New Netherlanders.
- And then those New Netherlanders soon slapped the word on English colonists in nearby Connecticut.
- By 1681 there may have even been a Dutch pirate, Captain Yanky or Yanke. The Dutch settlers, now subsumed into the English colony of New York, may have seen the Brits as pirates. Sounds awfully late in the timeline for me. I think it was definitely widespread slang before that.
- By the time of the Revolutionary War, the song “Yankee Doodle” was well established. Whatever its original intentions of mocking the Americans as simpletons, New Englanders took it as a badge of honor, macaroni and all.
- Somehow, after the Revolution, it became a synonym for Protestants descended from New England Puritans and their values. Take “Yankee ingenuity” as a prime example.
None of these quite convince me, but I feel Scottish, Swedish, and even Persian roots are even less likely.
Halloween’s in New England’s bones
Within our extended family, nobody had nicknames
Diminutives, yes, but nothing like Sonny or Bunny.
I don’t know what that means, other than perhaps a lack of imagination.
~*~
Well, Dad was known as Sandy, but only at the office. Guess it was because of the time he was stationed in Florida during the Second World War.
It’s not all about food or forestry, either
As long as we’re at the Common Ground Fair in Unity, Maine, let me mention a few presentations today that go beyond the solid fare of food, forestry, livestock, fleece and fiber.
For instance, a home funeral demo is followed by discussions on green cemeteries and community death care teams for those interested in alternatives to costly funeral traditions. There’s also a blacksmithing demo and a hands-on assembly of a ¼ scale timber barn. Chicken first aid could be amusing, as could the basic of breeding your own pigs.
Of special interest to me are the two contradances, a traditional shape-note sing (hope I remembered to pack my Sacred Harp hymnal) alas at the same time as an Indigenous storytelling session, and three Maine legends appearing together: folksinger Noel Paul Stookey, comedian Tim Sample, and guitarist David Mallett.
I’ve sung in the choir behind Stookey twice and can say he’s an amazing person and musician.
