Origins: Winter Solstice

 

The Winter Solstice is considered the most celebrated annual event in the history of human cultures around the world.  Ancient structures survive in many of today's countries that seem designed to funnel the solstice sunlight, from the Great Pyramid and the Karnak temples in Egypt to Stonehenge in England, but also in Turkey, Germany, France, Mexico, Wales, India, Zimbabwe, Peru, Easter Island, Cambodia, Japan, Canada, India, Bulgaria, Sweden, Russia, Brazil and the USA, among others.

Most of the traditions still found in the grab bag of modern Christmas observances come from Winter Solstice rituals, including the evergreen tree, holly, candles, the Yule log (and Yuletide itself) as well as stories of the birth of a divine son, usually in a cave or other dark place. Even the red and white outfit of Santa Claus mimics the red and white ritual garments of various cultures, including far northern cultures (think North Pole) for the Solstice. 

Many surviving indigenous cultures still celebrate the Winter Solstice.  In many indigenous and ancient observances the emphasis was on the light and dark, with attention not only to it being the shortest day of the year but the longest night--and so the stars were important.  It was at the same time the beginning of winter, which--for one thing--was the traditional time of story-telling.  In some tribes, the most important stories, such as the creation, could be told only in the winter season. The stars in the winter night sky could also be important in these stories.

For many, the Winter Solstice was the rebirth of light, and so of birth.  But for others the emphasis was more earthy, and not on birth, but on a kind of pregnancy.  For example, in rituals of the Caney Indians of Central America that I participated in a few times in the past, the central figure was a Mother Earth symbol, becoming pregnant and beginning the gestation of the new life that would appear in the spring, especially the plants growing up from the earth. As the days grow slowly longer, the life that appears in the spring grows slowly, unseen, in the dark earth.  It is a celebration of that promise.

I think of all this when the celebrations this time of year seem increasingly distant from the natural world which first inspired them.  That includes many of the remaining religious expressions, which are largely elements of institutions that, deliberately and not, have distanced themselves from these ties to natural cycles, the mysteries of the planet's life.

But mostly we see this in secular observances. Of course, gifts are always symbols of the heartfelt intent of the giver, regardless of what they are. But when we consider gifts we buy, the term "materialism" is often bandied about.  But it's not precisely materialism.  Commercialism maybe--the commodification of everything, and the emphasis on products and constructions that are largely abstractions, symbols of something--if nothing else, of successful advertising and momentary fashion. The real material, the real physical, is of the Earth.  

The material, the realities of our own planet becomes ever more distant each year, except as imagery manipulated by technologies. What we experience is becoming mostly what we see on those tiny phone screens.

As for the stars in our skies, who can see more than a few, if any at all? Smothered by electric lights, blocked by buildings, the night sky that was mightily present to our ancestors has just about disappeared.  And when I searched for photos of evergreens against a starry sky, most of what Google showed me were very enhanced, and many were already generated by A.I.  (I can't vouch for how altered the image above may be, but it purports to be an actual photo taken by Ryan Hutton in Wisconsin on the Winter Solstice.)

In the end nature won't be denied.  Deep cold, wind, rain, snow in unusual proportions and ferocity, that visit us with increasing frequency as partially the effects of climate distortion, will make themselves felt, if not known.  Stay safe, and remember the original: the Winter Solstice.

Origins: Thanks (and Franks) Giving

[Above: painting of Pueblo Green Corn Ceremony circa 1930 by Opwa Pi (Red Cloud)

The first ceremonial Thanksgivings in North America occurred before history was written on this continent.  Such individual ceremonies were part of daily lives for most if not all Indigenous hunters and gatherers, such as giving thanks to the animal that gave its life to the hunter, or a constant consciousness of sacredness in gathering and crafts like basket-weaving.

It is certain that even in historical times, group ceremonies of thanks among Native tribes included giving thanks for the harvest.  Tribes in the Eastern Woodlands and Southwest in particular celebrated Green Corn Ceremonies or festivals (and many still do.)  

It seems likely that the most famous "first" Thanksgiving in Patuexet (Plymouth), Massachusetts in 1621 (or 1623)  was at least partly inspired by such an event among local Native groups such as the Wampanoags who attended--and reportedly outnumbered the Pilgrim colonists.  Like traditional Green Corn ceremonies, it lasted three days, beginning on June 30.  This cooperative venture was not repeated.  The next harvest was bad, and eventually the Pilgrim fathers slaughtered the same tribal peoples, setting a horrific but often followed precedent.

Other religious ceremonies of thanks to the Christian God had already been held among colonists in Newfoundland (1578), Jamestown, La Florida and a colony in Maine.  The first national day of thanks was declared in 1789 by President George Washington, in gratitude for the Constitution.  It was held that year on November 26.  Other Presidents declared national Thanksgiving days, one year at a time and on various dates, though some Presidents didn't at all. 

Beginning in the first quarter of the 19th century, magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale began a 36 year campaign in favor of an annual and official Thanksgiving Day.  Today's tradition was established by President Abraham Lincoln in October 1863, just weeks before he gave his historic Gettysburg Address. In part he wanted the nation to give thanks but also pray for healing after the Civil War.  He'd already declared a day for thanksgiving that August, but then made Thanksgiving an annual holiday, to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November.

But the calendar is a tricky thing: sometimes the last Thursday of the month is the fourth, and sometimes (roughly two time out of seven) it is the fifth Thursday of the month.  In 1939 it was  the fifth, and retailers begged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare that year's Thanksgiving for the fourth Thursday, the next-to-last, because they were afraid of a foreshortened Christmas shopping season.  He agreed.

National pandemonium ensued, which only got worse in 1940 when FDR again designated the next-to-last Thursday, which that year was the third.  Republicans in particular derided him, and called it Franksgiving.  Some 16 states declared their own Thanksgiving day to be celebrated on the last Thursday, so there was no longer a national day of thanks.  In 1941, Congress passed a resolution assigning the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving, which FDR signed into law. (Retailers had not shown any appreciable change in sales with the earlier date.) 

 Some states continued to designate the last Thursday, and celebrations were muted during World War II, but by the end of the war, almost all of the nation celebrated on the new Franksgiving of the fourth Thursday. The last holdout was Texas, which did not change its law from the last to the fourth Thursday until 1956. (Then of course there's Canada, which holds its Thanksgiving the second Monday of October.)

Though it is unlikely that the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving included pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes and even today's breeds of turkey, most of the day's food traditions do seem to come from New England.  Recipes for most of the traditional meal are in the first cookbook published in America, in Connecticut in 1796. 

The Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York has been an annual event since 1930.  Coming near the end of the collegiate football season, Thanksgiving has been a tradition for rivalry games. (Hence the Great Turkey Heist at Knox College I participated in, oh long ago.)  The Detroit Lions began scheduling a game on Thanksgiving also in the 1930s. 

It all began with gratitude for nature's sustaining gifts.  But beginning with those first ideologues in New England and Virginia, Americans relationship to nature has been more hostile than grateful. Settlers and their descendants have been busy ruining the land and waters and now even the air for centuries, and we are close to finishing the job. Maybe we can at least acknowledge this with a little grace as we're saying grace, and try to do better.

  The natural world is the source of all life, including our big and dubious brains. The rest of nature would be grateful if we'd start using them wisely. "It is an error to say that we have 'conquered nature,'" FDR said in 1935, in the midst of an ecological crisis called the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression caused largely by wanton exploitation and destruction of land, forests and waters.  "We must, rather, start to shape our lives in a more harmonious relationship with nature."

Lots of other things are associated with family gatherings on Thanksgiving these days.  Those retailers have largely absorbed the holiday, with their extended pre-Christmas sales. Dispersal of families has meant travel has gone far beyond over the river and through the woods, and now involves the added tension of the busiest air travel time of the year. Thanksgiving also begins the holiday season when people measure themselves against a Norman Rockwell ideal, and find there are angry words, sulks, disappointment, bewilderments and tears as well as the occasional radiant smiles and gratitude.

Whether gratitude is part of the mix anymore is perhaps a matter of personal choice.  This year we may be thankful that things are not worse than they are, which may well itself become a Thanksgiving tradition.  

Origins: "The Holidays", Christmas and New Years

 

If you were a Catholic during the first two centuries of Christianity and you wanted to celebrate the birth of Jesus, you would be committing a sin and would go straight to hell.

That's because the Church fathers were emphasizing Christ's divinity and not his humanity.  Besides, no one knew (or much cared) when that birth happened.  The Biblical accounts point to spring, but it was kind of so what.

Then by the late third century the Christian church was large and influential enough to challenge the Roman gods, competing with the contemporary cult of the sun god Mithras, imported from Persia and popular enough to be declared the official religion of the Roman Empire.  It celebrated the birth of Mithras, or Natalis Solis Invicti, with a good long festival centered on December 25.

 It just happened to be about then that the Church got interested in Christ's birth, and more or less arbitrarily declared it was--surprising coincidence!--on December 25.  It took awhile but Christmas began to be celebrated throughout the Empire by the fourth century, when the Roman emperor Constantine was baptized a Christian.  

This December date is roughly that of the winter solstice, long a traditional time for ritual and celebration (including in surviving Indigenous cultures), as the days start to get longer, announcing the coming birth of spring.  In my life it was my Uncle Carl who explained the solstices and equinoxes to me--the nuns teaching me in school never mentioned them, possibly because such knowledge still seemed darkly pagan.

Like those of most holidays, Christmas customs are a mishmash of approximated traditions from many cultures in many eras, often shorn of their original meanings. But an impressive number of them are pretty recent--from the nineteenth century to the World War II era and beyond--especially the songs.  

When I was a child in the 1950s, we used to hear Gene Autry's original recording of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" on the radio--it was a poem devised as an advertisement for Montgomery Ward department stores that was set to music in 1949 and became a massive hit for him.  It has since sold more records that any song except Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," which itself was written in 1942 by Irving Berlin for the Crosby movie "Holiday Inn."

That's me in 1951, defending my sister
Kathy in my new Hopalong outfit

Crosby had another Christmas hit the next year with "I'll Be Home for Christmas," very definitely a World War II song. "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire...) is from 1945. 

Though Perry Como had a bigger hit with it in 1953, Gene Autry followed up his Rudolph bonanza with "Frosty the Snowman" in 1950, and I used to see the animated accompaniment to the song on WJAC-TV in Johnstown;  the station puts it on the air every Christmastime to this day. 

  "It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas" is from 1951, with its specific reference to the first television star to generate product lines, the cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy.

Even the venerable "Jingle Bells" is from the mid-nineteenth century, but for years it was simply one of many songs of that era about sleigh rides, and was first performed in minstrel shows.  It took at least a decade or two before it became associated with Christmas.  Now it is perhaps the most familiar Christmas song in the world.

Rudolph's origin in advertising wasn't unique.  Advertisers were mighty drivers of Christmas imagery for obvious reasons.  They were also apparently responsible for changing the expression "the holidays" from referring to school vacations in the summer to the Christmas to New Years period (and conveniently so, for this was before the non-Christian holidays such as Hanukkah and Kwanza were widely included in general public perception.)  The earliest example of "Happy Holidays" imagery appears to be a 1937 ad for Camel cigarettes.

When I was a kid in the 50s, the holidays were really "the holidays"--they extended past New Years.  I notice here in Arcata these days that holiday decorations go up early (I saw Halloween decorations in late September), which is of course how retail stores and related businesses have done it for decades--get in the spirit (and the spending) early.  But Christmas decorations are often taken down even before New Years.  In my childhood we didn't decorate until the week before or even the week of Christmas.  In some families it was traditional to trim the tree on Christmas Eve or maybe the day before that.  

Christmas itself was for children, and the close family gathered on the Eve and the Day.  But after that it was more for the adults.  Certain pastries and other foods and certainly drinks came out that weren't around at other times of the year.  And then the visiting commenced.  Close family again sometimes, but mostly more distant relations and my parents' friends and their families would visit us or we would visit them, or both.  These could be my mother's old friends from high school (who were often related to us somehow anyway) or my father's current and past work colleagues, and then later those of my mother's when she started working in hospital administration.  They weren't the most fun times for me but they were memorable--my chance to observe adults in their natural environment.

This would go on past New Years, and the decorations would stay up until early January.  It was a long Christian tradition to take them down on Twelfth Night (which is what they called January 5 in England), the night before the feast of the Epiphany, or the visit of the Magi. We weren't that exact, but it usually was around then.  Maybe sooner, if the Christmas tree was drying out and shedding needles.  It's worth noting that commercial activity was at a low ebb after Christmas then, until perhaps the January White Sales.  So they really were the holidays.

Like Christmas, New Years traditions are a cultural hodgepodge.  But there are some revealing origins, mostly associated with the new year as celebrated in the spring. January 1 became the first of the new year with the introduction of the Julian calendar in Rome, but wasn't firmly established throughout the world until the universal adoption of the Gregorian calendar, which took centuries.

But because the new year had been celebrated nearer the March equinox, many traditions were associated with crops and their fertility.   Next to the Fourth of July, New Year's Eve is the holiday most associated with making noise, including explosions.  This tradition was originally to scare away the demons that destroyed crops, especially with diseases.  

On the other hand, some new year traditions were to encourage growth.  The tradition of wassail, a hot drink with alcoholic properties, was part of ancient Anglo-Dane and Anglo-Saxon holiday rites.  In some areas of England, the tradition was all about conviviality, and was associated with Christmas. But at least in one region it was part of another ritual.  Some sources say it was a Twelfth Night ritual, but Henry David Thoreau writes about it in detail (in his essay "Wild Apples") and associates part of it with New Year's.

In Thoreau's account, the drink was an apple cider, and was used in a rite to encourage apple trees to be fruitful.  It would be shared with the trees on Christmas Eve, and people would dance around it and chant a particular song, to call for a bountiful harvest.  Then on New Year's Eve, in another ritual of noise, a group of boys would visit apple orchards and engage in what was called "apple howling" to encourage the trees, and once again perform a chant while circling them. They also rapped on the trees with sticks, which was called "wassailing," according to Thoreau.  

A New Year's tradition of the Iroquois in America, still existing when Europeans arrived, was to build a huge bonfire and throw their possessions into it, so it would literally be a new year.

Origins: Halloween

 

Halloween has got to be the weirdest holiday, and is now among the biggest.  At least it is here in northern California. The influence of the major Halloween parades and parties in San Francisco has spread, along with commercial exploitation, so I started seeing Halloween house decorations going up in mid-September.  In my youth in western PA it was mostly for children to toddle around cutely in stuffy costumes in the cold, mostly unable to see, then to stand mutely in the suddenly hot doorways of strangers while holding out a bag for candy.  That's steadily changed.  Young adult parties are more frequent, and their costumes can be very elaborate.

Halloween is weird because, among other things, it's about death and dead people.  That is indeed part of its origins, but it was also mixed up with harvest celebration, masking and mischief-making, the coming of winter, and treats.  These days it seems also to be about sex and death.  Weird.

Many cultures have designated days to commemorate the dead.  By tradition, they tend to be in late autumn, as winter approaches--the season of cold when plants are dormant, and food can be scarce. Today's Halloween on October 31 appears to be a very ancient tradition of Celtic Ireland and Scotland, dating to the fifth century B.C. That day was the official end of summer and the harvest season, with November 1 marking their New Year.  It was believed that this was a kind of liminal day in which the dead could visit the Earth.

There are different accounts of what this day actually entailed.  The tamer version suggests a festival, in which villagers appeased the departed with gifts of food left outside their homes, or places set at their tables for their honored dead.  Bonfires were lit to purify, as well as to ward off evil spirits.

The darker version suggests the belief was that those who'd died the previous year could return to choose the body of a person or animal to inhabit for the following year, before they passed over permanently into the afterlife.  This is the literal meaning of "haunting":  not to scare someone, but to inhabit them (as we speak of our old haunts.)

 To prevent this haunting, people dressed up as demons and witches to frighten the dead away. They had extinguished their hearth fires so they wouldn't attract the dead to their homes, and paraded wildly to a big bonfire outside of town, where some unfortunate (and probably mentally ill) individual whose behavior might suggest possession by spirits would be sacrificed in the fire, to warn the dead that possessing one of them wasn't going to work. As these traditions spread in Europe over the centuries, the human sacrifice transformed to the burning of effigies.  Halloween these days dilutes this a little more, with effigies but not much burning.

Whatever the mix was, it probably reflected the perennial twinned attitudes towards the dead: an empathetic desire to honor and help them on the one hand, and fear of them on the other, with malevolence towards the living projected on them.

A Celtic carved turnip--or space alien?

The Celts appear to have originated a few other lasting Halloween traditions.  In Ireland they hollowed out turnips and carved scary faces on them. In southern Ireland, young men would go door to door reciting verses.  If they were fed, the house could expect good fortune; if not, not.  In Scotland, this approach was modified to something closer to today: the youths would go to houses dressed in scary costumes with faces blackened by fire ashes, and threaten mischief if they weren't properly welcomed.  

It's said that these traditions accompanied the Irish and Scots to America.  Lacking the right kind of turnips, however, they turned to pumpkins.  

By then, the Catholic Church had long established its own ownership of this time of year for remembrance of the dead, stipulating October 31 as All Hallow's Eve (from which the name Halloween probably comes): like Christmas Eve, it was a vigil of an actual holiday, which in this case was All Saints Day on November 1, a holy day when Catholics are obliged to attend Mass.  And for good measure, All Souls Day was designated for November 2.  

Various countries and cultures have incorporated their folk traditions in ritual observances around these days to honor the dead.  But the biggest observance by far is Halloween, shorn completely of conscious intentions or comprehended ritual.  America has never figured out how to honor the dead beyond funerals (though that practice is itself waning), with the possible exception of those killed in wars.

But even in the guise of fun, Halloween reveals a lot of complicated if unconscious feelings about the dead and death.  Elaborate costumes and trick or treating (from which the tricks have largely disappeared) function as many other festivals did and do--they create a time and space outside the normal, a permitted indulgence in whimsy, allowing for expressing different identities and generally loosening the normal constraints: unrestrained life as the answer to death, perhaps.  

 The dance with death is complicated.  I once participated in an annual event in Pittsburgh, the "Night of the Living Dead" (Pittsburgh being where that iconic movie was made) in which various dead rock stars performed.  I was Buddy Holly.  I refused, however, to don the pale death makeup.  I wasn't going to make fun of one of my musical heroes: I wanted to honor him and the life of his music. I could do the voice. It was great fun. 

Loosening restraints and taking on new identities has led to sexy costumes.  In the 1970s I frequented a bar and restaurant where at least a dozen beautiful young women worked as waitresses.  At the restaurant's Halloween party they all showed up in costume: about half were dressed as provocative witches, with the other half as classic Ladies of the Night. 

 That may have been more a comment on their jobs, but it does seem that in sexy costumes and make-up, particularly in variations on the traditional horror figures of witches, ghosts, ghouls, vampires, zombies etc., there is again an uneasy convergence of sex and death. The thrill of the transgressive must be part of it, maybe even the mocking of death, but beyond bravado it's not clear there's much consciousness of the reality behind the techniques.

I've never fully understood the entertainment value of being scared, or especially of scaring people.  I get it that children (and others) learn to deal with their fears through experimentation, and that the rush comes not from the scare but from the moment afterwards, when it's clear there was no threat.  But haunted houses for kids, or bloody horror movies for adults--both now apparently part of Halloween--aren't anywhere near the top of my list for ways to have fun.  What I'd be afraid of is traumatizing a child--or myself.  Like many holidays, it is very far from its origins, while still raising profound issues but mostly without clear or meaningful rituals to explore them.  So Halloween as a holiday itself scares me a little. 

The Best of What's Still Around: Navel Oranges

 

One of my first purchases after moving to California in 1996 was a bag of a dozen navel oranges at the Arcata Farmer's Market. That was accidentally poetic in that when I was very young, that's all I knew about California apart from television: it was where they grew oranges.  It was the 1950s and the few people we knew who made the long fabled voyage to California, invariably returned with oranges.  They were much prized.

But even though most of the orange groves in southern California are long gone (Kim Stanley Robinson played among them as a child, and as a teenager watched them destroyed to make way for more and more suburbia), there are still navel oranges grown there.

Navel oranges are seedless, and the first tree to grow them was apparently a mutation, an accidental hybrid, a sport of nature.  This was in Brazil.  Because they are seedless, new trees come only from cuttings from the old.  So at first all navel orange trees derived from that one tree.  

Disease wiped out the navels of Brazil in the 1930s.  By then fortunately California had its own variety, begun in the 1870s by a recent California settler, a woman who was an abolitionist and a Suffragette.  Nobody was then certain where the navel orange would best grow in America, but when she requested and was sent two cuttings from the Department of Agriculture in Washington (hence they are still called Washington navel oranges), she planted them in her front yard in Riverside.  From those two flourishing trees, the navel orange became a leader in the California citrus industry, which by the 1920 was the second largest income generator in the state, next to oil.  Now every navel orange tree in the world is a descendant of those two trees in Riverside.  One of the two trees survived to this day, an officially designated Historical Landmark.

Though I kept buying those bags at the Farmer's Market once in awhile, I wasn't over my suspicions of oranges.  Most of the oranges back in PA came from Florida, and they were frequently too tart and even sour, and always very acidic.  Enjoying the fruit of the orange after peeling it was hit and miss.  If it's a miss, you're left with a peeled orange nobody wants.

But for at least the past ten years and probably longer, I have gloried in the navel orange.  I bought them at the supermarket--they are typically large (sometimes very large, not much smaller than a grapefruit.)  Their skin is thick but easy to peel--it's not entirely unusual to peel them in one piece.  Inside they are almost invariably sweet, and never acidic. They have a unique texture.  On most days a navel orange and a cup of coffee still are my entire breakfast.

In more recent years they seem to have become more scarse, and available less often during the year.  They are a winter fruit but for years they disappeared only in August for maybe a couple of months.  In recent years they've come and gone, and sometimes they are much smaller.  So when I get the big ones I tend to eat half at a time, and that's good enough.

I don't know how climate distortion is affecting them, though they are said to be hardy, but climate is very quietly affecting the quality, availability and prices of a lot of fruits and vegetables.  The Florida orange crop has been severely depleted.  Though I consider the navel orange to be the closest to perfection, other varieties of oranges have gone through fashionable periods, so some growers are tempted to stop growing the navels.

But this year, after months with fairly small, and thin-skinned varieties, the classic large thick-skinned sweet navel began appearing.  I've had a good supply for several months now, though the last trip to the supermarket suggested that they may be diminishing.   But for as long as they last, I'm going to be grateful that such a wonderful thing is still around. 

Origins: Easter and April Fool's Day

 Easter is what’s known in Catholicism as a moveable feast—that is, it doesn’t occur on the same date every year.  This religious holiday had been observed on different dates and days of the week until the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 decreed it would be observed on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox (the first day of spring.)  So it never falls earlier than March 22 nor later than April 25.

 Easter is the most important holy day (or holi-day) in Christianity, commemorating the resurrection of Christ after his crucifixion.  In my Catholic schooling in the 1950s, it was the end of a drama that began four weeks before with the beginning of Lent, with the liturgy supplying the events and observances between. 

As for the timing of the observance and even the name, the early Church superimposed it on the Saxon festival to the goddess of spring, whose name was Eostre.  Some theorize that persecuted Christians celebrating their holy day at the same time as Eostre made them less conspicuous. 

 In any case, most of the other familiar elements of Easter echo the fertility rites and symbolism of the original holiday, like the rabbits (as in “breeding like,” the hare was the animal associated with the goddess Eostre in Saxon lore) and eggs (an ancient custom of exchanging actual eggs turned to chocolate in the nineteenth century.) 

 Some Easter eggs are worth more than others, like the gold and diamond décor of the Faberge egg, or the decorated eggs in Germany inscribed with a child’s date of birth, which functioned legally as a birth certificate in the 1880s. 

My Italian grandparents had various Easter traditions involving pastries and baked goods, but for the first time this Easter I had a Hot Cross bun, courtesy of our local Quaker meeting, of which Margaret is a member.  This bun tradition goes back to the Saxon feast of Eostre.  When the Catholic Church absorbed it, the bun indeed carried the design of a cross. 

Because of this year's calendar, Easter was celebrated just one day before another spring holiday.

April Fool's Day

 April Fool’s Day is always April 1, and that's a key to its specific origins. It has roots in many cultures that reach as far back as history goes, and probably farther. Part of its complex pedigree is a meaningful relationship to the American Bill of Rights.  But most directly, it's about New Years.

The historical roots of the day include ancient festivals of spring which often had some component of comedy, trickery and release from ordinary rules, which in the western world at least usually included orgies of gluttony, drunkenness and sexual licentiousness.

 The probable direct ancestor of April Fool's Day is more specific—when France adopted the Gregorian calendar in the sixteenth century, New Year's moved from April 1 to January 1. But old habits are hard to break, especially if they began in 45 B.C., when Julius Caesar set up the old Julian calendar. Some gullible Parisians were tricked by clever neighbors into celebrating New Year's on what was now the wrong day.

Out of this was born the classic cry, April Fish! Which is something that did not cross the Atlantic when the calendar was later changed in America. No one is quite sure what the fish thing is about, but the day is still celebrated that way in France.  Still, the first April Fool's Day jest was probably, "Happy New Year!"

But the more important aspect of this history relates to the tradition of the licensed fool. For centuries, most European and some Asian countries had them, popularly known as court jesters. From imperial Rome through the medieval period and the Renaissance, official fools were not only a popular and well known presence in royal courts, but for part of that time were also employed by cities, clergy and wealthy families.

Their duties ranged from song and dance to pratfalls and acrobatics, ribaldry and general foolishness. At times no fashionable dinner party was complete without a fool hired to insult the guests. But the key element of the "allowed fool" was his (and occasionally, her) freedom to do and especially to say anything to anyone.

The official fool also has roots in an aspect of the aforementioned festivals, which featured a Lord of Misrule— a commoner who took on the trappings of the king or bishop or town mayor for a day. As far back as the tenth century, these became elaborate performances, mixing entertainment with social comment, and topical plays or burlesque sermons that satirized the real rulers of state and church, who had to at least pretend to enjoy it. These events became hugely popular, but nobody was fool enough to criticize the powerful if there were going to be reprisals. So the tradition included immunity for the fool.

When kings hired permanent court jesters, political satire as well as pointed personal remarks were part of their repertoire, and the tradition of immunity came with them. Archibald Armstrong, one of England's last and most political jesters replied, "No one has ever heard of a fool being hanged for talking, but many dukes have been beheaded for their insolence." So it happened that the only people in Europe with the absolute right of free speech were kings and queens, and fools.

This fact was not lost on others who were agitating for that kind of freedom for all. The original document of the Magna Carta, England's first great challenge to absolute royal power in 1215, was decorated with the figure of a court jester. From the late 15th century until well into the 17th, "societies of fools" flourished in France, composed of young men who criticized the government and agitated for freedom while wearing the traditional court jester motley.

America never had court jesters, though some of its first expressions of freedom and identity were in the foolery tradition, from the burlesque of the Boston Tea Party (a bunch of Anglos badly costumed as Indians who struck a blow for political independence by dumping tea into cold water) to some early symbols such as Yankee Doodle and Uncle Sam. 

 "Yankee" was a British ethnic slur which New Englanders turned into a badge of honor, and Yankee Doodle Dandy was a clown figure (what else can you say about a guy who sticks a feather in his cap and calls it macaroni?) made immortal in the song sung at key moments in the American Revolution, including at the British surrender. A similar figure, a Yankee "wise fool" stock character popular in early American stage comedies, was a source for Uncle Sam.

Americans also pride themselves on being straightforward, so there's a companion tradition of mistrusting the tricky. But today our Zeitgeist depends so heavily on some forms of deceit--spin, disinformation, oversimplifying and the straight-faced lie--that selectively moralizing about other forms rings hollow.  Injustice wears clothes of obscurant nomenclature, and success by any means necessary is our guiding morality. Mendacity is a trick of power.

The heart of the fool's relation to free speech is speaking truth to power. For awhile we may have thought that serious journalism was going to do that, but when the most powerful owns the most presses, and the line between editorial and advertising becomes more and more imaginary, it's looking like a piquant hope.

The rich and powerful can easily ridicule the countrified (the original meaning of "clown") and unsophisticated, but the figure of the fool deflects the ridicule back upon the pretentious and corrupt. Freedom to criticize the powerful is at the heart of both the fool tradition and free speech.

The pretensions of power are automatic, perhaps the inevitable product of consciousness equipped with opposable thumbs. Our particular social systems depend on some forms of deceit while moralizing about others. Historians are dishonored for missing quotation marks, but not if the history they write is dishonest bunk. Paradox or irony shade into hypocrisy as we deny freedoms in the name of protecting freedom.

Today April Fool's Day is just about our only nod to this tradition. You can play tricks on people any day of the year, but the idea is that on this day, you are allowed to.  But since most of today’s jokes will be made online, it looks pretty much like every day on the Internet, where intentional misinformation is standard. This is the scarier side of information without authority, and often without conscience.

Since laughter seems to override anger, wit is often its own protection, at least temporarily. The cosmos itself seems designed with persistent uncertainties, which is perhaps why many religious and cultural traditions make the trickster a major myth.

Historically and perhaps in practice, the freedom of the fool makes way for freedom of speech in all its aspects. Humor often seems to make the truth clearer and perhaps easier to acknowledge. We have to be tricked into seeing what we would rather not see. We can have tricksters without truth, and in our entertainment-dominated society we mostly do. But rarely can we fallible humans have truth without tricksters.

Origins: Valentine's Day

As is often true, the ultimate origin of Valentine's Day is unknown, though there are plenty of juicy legends repeated as fact, all disputed by at least some scholars.  But the one makes the most sense to me is this: its roots are in the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, held on the Ides of February (February 15.) 

 Lupercalia was an early spring fertility festival, ostensibly in honor of a god of agriculture but also of Rome's founders, Romulus and Remus.  According to that origin legend, they were twin boys abandoned in a cave and raised by a wolf (Latin and Harry Potter scholars will recognize that the"lupa" in Lupercalia means a she-wolf.)  The festival traditionally began with a rite at that legendary cave.

But the rest of Lupercalia was dedicated to different sorts of fertility, with naked drunks running through the streets (some suggest the day also honored the god Pan), past married women who hoped they would become pregnant or have an easy delivery if they were touched by the goat's hide strips the men brandished. 

Yet another custom--more related to today's holiday-- was a lottery in which unmarried women dropped their names into an urn for unmarried men to randomly extract.  The two would become a couple, presumably including sexual favors, either for the course of the festival or (according to other sources) the entire year.  This even speedier variation on speed dating often (it is said) resulted in marriage. 

All of this went on for centuries, until the Catholic Church finally predominated.  In the fifth century, the Pope banned Lupercalia, and replaced it with St. Valentine's Day.  Some sources claim that the choice of St. Valentine was simply because he was officially martyred on that date.  Maybe.  But whenever the Church replaced a pagan feast day, or built a church over a pre-Christian sacred site, the replacement is often related to the earlier intent-- especially since Indigenous and other pre-Christian special days were related to natural cycles of the calendar, such as when birds and other animals begin mating in the early spring.

Besides, there are stories of at least three St. Valentines, all supposedly martyred, and none proven to have existed.  But by the Middle Ages the Church had a great cover story that related Valentine to the date, without saying so.  According to this legend, it all started when the third century Roman emperor Claudius II banned marriage.

Claudius had risen through the military (the first Emperor to have done so, and the first to be of "barbarian" birth) and thought marriage made soldiers weak and fretful, distracted by wives and children at home. And Claudius was often at war.

 But a Christian prelate in Rome called Valentine continued to secretly marry couples, until he came to the attention of Claudius.  During Valentine's imprisonment, he and Claudius had lively discussions, each trying to convert the other to their religion.  But only one of them was the emperor, so Valentine was executed.

Did any of this happen?  Outlawing marriage was not entirely unknown in Rome, but the encyclopedia entry that Wikipedia uses doesn't mention Claudius II (also known as Claudius Gothicus) doing so.  There is a further addition to the legend that says while he was imprisoned, Valentine had some sort of relationship--perhaps even fell in love with--his jailer's daughter.  Before his execution, he left her a note, "from your Valentine."  Right--at least a degree of cuteness too far.  

But by the Middle Ages, Valentine was a popular saint across Europe, and St. Valentine's Day became a day for celebrating early love, a sanitized--or at least euphemistic-- version of the Roman holiday.  The tradition of the card now called the valentine may have also derived from the age-old traditions of  Lupercalia.  Denied their lottery, it's said that young Roman men sent handwritten greetings to women they admired on the mid-February date.

But the first documented (and still existing) valentine card was sent by Charles, duke of Orleans in 1415.  He sent it to his wife, who happened to be a prisoner in the Tower of London at the time. 

 Handmade cards began to bear the image of Cupid (also related to Roman love customs) and to include amorous verses.  The printing press made the "mechanical valentine" a thing, and lower postal rates in 19th century England meant they didn't need to be hand-delivered, and could even be sent anonymously.  This led to more explicit imagery and racy verses, to the extent that in 19th century Chicago, some 25,000 valentines were deemed too obscene to deliver.  

Among the rude cards of the 19th and early 20th centuries were "vinegar valentines," that expressed insults--doubly so, since it often was the receiver and not the sender who had to pay the postage. Meanwhile, erotic valentines--intended as humorous or maybe not--survive into the 21st century.

The first printed valentines in America were pricey, but when greeting card companies produced less expensive versions, the practice of sending them became almost obligatory, rivaling only Christmas for predominance.  Through the 20th century at least, many faced Valentine's Day with anxiety and dread, counting the cards they got from fellow fifth graders, or mourning the first February 14 that their mailbox was bereft.  

As for the Xs denoting kisses on valentines and other written notes--which likely makes it the first emoji--they seem to be a remnant from illiterate times when many could sign their name only with an X, and sealed it with a kiss. If present trends continue, those days may not be gone forever.       

Origins: Chewing Gum

ad from the 1930s

 Every year, for who knows how long, Knox College seniors in Galesburg, Illinois (though apparently only men) would receive a mimeographed note in their campus mailbox.  I got one my senior year of 1967-68.  It read:

  “ Mr. Lester Smiley, Vice-President of the American Chicle Company, will be on the campus Friday, February 23.  He would like to hold a group meeting for those men interested in a job opportunity with their company. The interviews will be held on Friday, February 23 in the College Placement Office.  Mr. Smiley is a Knox College graduate and, as you know, we have placed many Knox graduates with American Chicle.”

 I can quote this notice so precisely because I experienced it as a bit of found poetry, and literally stapled it into the draft of the play I was writing, “What’s Happening, Baby Jesus?”  When the play was performed that May, freshman Michael Shain came out in a business suit and recited it, with the cheerful addition: “So come on out and keep America chewing!”  It got one of the bigger laughs of the show.  

Rockford High yearbook 

For decades, American Chicle made chewing gum in Rockford, Illinois, and (at various times) in Newark, Brooklyn, Cleveland, New Orleans, Portland, Oregon and around the world. They don’t make so much of it anymore (in fact, after being swallowed up by a succession of bigger companies—even though swallowing is something you shouldn’t do with chewing gum-- a company by that name no longer exists.) Chewing gum has apparently dropped out of fashion, at least for awhile. But for a long time, America kept on chewing.

 “Chewing gum” as we know it began in the USA, though humans everywhere have been chewing stuff without swallowing it for a very long time.  Some Indigenous peoples in South America (for example)  chewed particular plants for energy and stamina, and/or to get high.  Chewing tobacco is another such instance.

 People chewed various leaves, nuts, twigs and gummy substances for millennia, as breath sweeteners and digestive aids, to stave off hunger and thirst, and just for the fun of it.  Denizens of the far north chewed whale blubber, and Europeans chewed animal fats, sometimes in social hours at the end of meals (hence, perhaps, the expression “chewing the fat” to mean convivial—and trivial—conversation, though the origins of this phrase are obscure, based on what seem to be barely educated guesses.)  By the nineteenth century in America, chewing wax was the popular if not entirely satisfactory favorite.

 But the substances we know as chewing gum had their origins in the 1850s.  For some of us you could say the story starts with Davy Crockett.

 Just about anyone who went to Knox College—or any college-- in the 1960s would have experienced the Davy Crockett craze of the 50s, centered on TV films starring Fess Parker, shown endlessly on the Disneyland anthology hour.  The last of the three supposedly biographical tales was about Davy Crockett joining the heroic band defending the Alamo—150 or so men facing 1500 Mexican soldiers.  After holding the Alamo for ten days, Davy Crockett and his compatriots were all killed in the battle or executed afterwards.  The general of the Mexican forces, who was named but never seen in the Disney film, was Santa Anna.  We knew that name. 

 Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was not only the General of the army ruthlessly intent on putting down a rebellious attempt of Texas to secede from Mexico—he was also at the time the President of Mexico.  In fact he was President of Mexico at least five times.  He was also the General that soon after the Alamo, was defeated by Sam Houston’s forces, and thereby lost Texas.  Later he was the general (and president) who provoked and then lost a war with the entire United States. 

 Santa Anna’s career was marked by idealism, hypocrisy, vanity, charm, chicanery, avarice, incompetence and betrayal, and by a remarkable ability to survive.  He was also in it for the money.  His brief last term as president was a mockery of a monarchy.  After he was deposed he went into exile, and ended up for a time in—of all places-- Staten Island in New York, where he cultivated a partner in a get-rich-quick scheme.

 There are several versions of this story. In one, he brought with him about a ton of chicle, the sap of the manikara zapota or sapodilla tree, an evergreen found in jungles of southern Mexico and Central America.  His American partner (or employee or go-between-- the exact relationship varies with the telling) was Thomas Adams, a photographer and inventor.  Santa Anna liked to chew the chicle, so Adams was tasked with finding a market for it—as the basis for rubber tires attached to buggy wheels.  Santa Anna convinced him it was a great idea.

  No one was interested.  Then Santa Anna decamped, leaving Adams with a ton of chicle.  He recalled how one of his sons picked up the habit of chewing it from Santa Anna, and got another son, a traveling salesman, to try selling it as a chewing substitute for paraffin wax.  Probably unbeknownst to him, the product had been test-marketed for ages by the Aztecs, who chewed this chictli.  But after a little success, Adams gave it the American mass-production spin by inventing a machine in 1871 that divided the chicle into strips. He also invented the first gumballs. 

An enterprising druggist in Kentucky began adding flavor to the gum, though the taste was medicinal.  Adams then created a licorice-flavored gum he called Black Jack. It was the longest surviving brand of chewing gum, still sticking to the bottom of movie theatre seats almost a century later. Adams sold Black Jack and another venerable brand, Tutti Frutti, through vending machines in New York.  Later he would market Chiclets.   

In the late 1880s, a candy store owner in Cleveland named William J. White, who supposedly invented chewing gum all over again when he mistakenly ordered a barrel of Yucatan chicle, added a peppermint taste. Then other brands familiar to my generation began arriving.  Physician Edward Beeman began processing pepsin for its stomach-soothing properties, and heeded a suggestion to add it to chewing gum: Beeman’s Pepsin Chewing Gum. It was still marketed as such in the 1950s and possibly longer.

 In 1890, Adams brought together several existing manufacturers, including Beeman and White, to form the American Chicle company. Eventually it would become an international giant. Together with production and product refinements (the first Adams chewing gum was the consistency of taffy), chewing gum became a lucrative product. 

Helping that popularity along was a former soap salesman named William Wrigley, Jr., who introduced his Spearmint gum in 1892, followed by Juicy Fruit in 1893.  Wrigley was also a pioneer in advertising and publicity—perhaps giving rise to the expression “selling it like soap.” 

 Wrigley headquartered his own company in Chicago, which became enormously prosperous, presenting the city with the Wrigley Building and the classic ballpark Wrigley Field for his Chicago Cubs baseball team. 

Another company that formed around this time was Beech-Nut, which started out as a baby food company but soon branched out in some weird ways, into chewing tobacco, for instance.  Beech-Nut also entered the chewing gum market with their peppermint, spearmint and Doublemint brands.    

 Like the first manufactured cigarettes and American chocolate bars, the presence of chewing gum in the rations of American soldiers during World War I created a larger market when the soldiers returned, in addition to giving Europe a taste of America. So it was in the 1920s that chewing gum began to be a defining feature of American life, and began its spread to Europe and beyond.  Even Coca Cola briefly got into the act with its own gum.

 By my childhood in the 1950s and adolescence in the early 1960s, chewing gum was a somewhat controversial but still ubiquitous part of the every day.  The brands we knew and chewed included some of the age-old: many early brands failed, but bright yellow Juicy Fruit packages were everywhere, and Black Jack and Cloves rattled down from the lobby vending machines at the movies. 

Chewing gum brands were heavily advertised, including on television (Double your pleasure, double your fun, with Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint Gum!) Though chewing gum became associated with rebellious teenagers (teachers generally frowned on it, and institutions hated the mess) it was mainly marketed to adults.  New additives, it was claimed, helped clean teeth and breath as well as calm nerves. If a stick of chewing gum stuffed in your mouth seemed too vulgar, there was cinnamon flavored Dentyne, in a different sized package and divided in petite pieces, marketed as a dental—and mental--health aid.

 There was chewing gum for everything: Aspergum contained aspirin, there were nicotine gums; my father regularly chewed tablets of an antacid gum called Chooz.  By the 1970s there were sugarless gums, marketed as dieting aids. 

My generation got the gum habit from childhood bubble gum.  It had a separate and later history, because it took longer to create a gum that produced durable bubbles. But the techniques were finally perfected, and the Fleer Company began selling Dubble Bubble in the 1930s, though with sugar shortages it devoted its entire production to the armed forces in World War II and didn’t resume domestic sales until 1951.  Around then, Topps began selling Bazooka bubble gum.

 In my childhood we got Dubble Bubble and Bazooka in small, fat squares, wrapped tightly and individually. Both brands were wrapped on the inside with paper containing a comic strip or panel.  For Bazooka it was the adventures of Bazooka Joe.  Dubble Bubble’s hero was called Pud.  Both also included fortunes; Dubble added interesting “facts.”  

In the 1930s, Fleer also started selling packages of bubble gum with cardboard photos of major league baseball players.  By my 1950s childhood, Topps had joined and perhaps surpassed them.  Those packages were single thin rectangles of gum slightly smaller than the cards that we all collected, treasured, traded and played with.  It was also our early form of gambling, as you did not know what players you were getting in each package.

 We also got football cards, with pictures of professional football players (much less popular than baseball players--college and even high school football teams were better known then.)  Eventually there would be cards of many different kinds: from Davy Crockett to the Beatles, Star Trek and Star Wars, and yes (I reluctantly admit) the Brady Bunch. 

A switch from bubble gum to chewing gum exclusively was part of the transition from childhood to adolescence, and the Beech-Nut gums in particular were part of that, if only for sponsoring Dick Clark’s Saturday night music show starting in 1958, which featured many of the current stars lip-synching to their latest singles.  Though this was black and white television, I still remember the dark green package of spearmint gum he would display.

 Chewing gum in a bewildering number of new tastes continues to be sold around the world. Still, as the 20^th century wound down, chewing gum began to lose its cultural flavor.  It was less fashionable, a little déclassé.  Beemans got a boost when the Tom Wolfe book and the 1983 film The Right Stuff revealed it as famed test pilot Chuck Yeager’s favorite ritual before a dangerous flight.  But that didn’t slow the trend downward.

 

Still, even some celebrities kept chewing, if somewhat secretly. One of the last public gum chewers was John Lennon, who famously was seen chewing gum while singing “All You Need Is Love” to an international TV audience.  By the 24^th century, gum is so unknown that when offered a stick of gum by a libidinous desk sergeant in a 1940s holodeck simulation, Doctor Beverly Crusher committed the cardinal rookie mistake, and swallowed it.

 The fortunes of those great chewing gum companies has followed, along with the disappearance of many classic brands.  American Chicle is gone, Beech-Nut is back to making just baby food.  Though now a subsidiary of a candy company, only Wrigley remains an international giant in chewing gum.

 But such is the power of nostalgia for classic chewing gum brands that a wrinkled up package,  a decades-dry stick or related item can fetch tens, hundreds, even thousands of dollars.  And of course it’s become a cliché of my generation to bemoan the bubble gum baseball cards that were thrown away with the other detritus of childhood.   A 1952 Mickey Mantle hauled in $12.6 million. Chew on that awhile.

Gallery

American Chicle Building in Portland, Oregon.

Thomas Adams (and sons) put their name on several products, and the Adams name was used for others long afterwards.  This is one of the brands that didn't last.

Baseball players were known for chewing substances other than chewing gum.  Nevertheless,  Beech-Nut did a series of endorsement ads with prominent players--none more prominent than Stan the Man. 

The classic Dubble Bubble...

In the effort to give chewing gum legitimacy, especially in the early days, companies made various health claims.  Beemans however was sincere--he was a champion of pepsin, and many other companies later used pepsin in their gum, and featured the word prominently in packaging and promotions.

When I tried to recall specific baseball cards I actually had in my collecting years, I could remember of course the prominent names, like Mickey Mantle, Roberto Clemente, etc.  But the actual card?  For some reason the first I recalled was the Gene Baker card with the dark green background.  Gene Baker is a forgotten player from the 50s and early 60s, but his last team was the Pittsburgh Pirates, which I followed religiously, especially in the 1957,58, 59 and World Championship 1960 seasons.  When he came to the Pirates in the Dale Long trade in 1957, I kept waiting to see him but he rarely played, hobbled by injuries and better players in front of him.  He'd been a shortstop, converted to second base in Chicago (sharing the infield with the great Ernie Banks--the two of them were among the first black players in the NL after Jackie Robinson) and a utility infielder in Pittsburgh.  He was on the 1960 team, used sparingly to spell Don Hoak at third and pinch-hit.  He soon retired but stayed with the Pirates organization, and became the first black manager and coach in organized baseball (in the minors), and if only for part of one game in 1963, the first black manager in the Major Leagues.