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New Year’s Resolutions–To Bid Farewell to Scandal?

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farewelltoscandalI was googling around to see if people during the Regency might have made New Year’s resolutions and found confirmation in a delightful post from The Snug Blog. The author found a 1792 etching “A Long String of Resolutions for a New Year – Design’d by G.M. Woodward” including satirical sketches of people making various resolutions including the one shown here.

I imagine they probably had a similar success rate to what people have now. Googling further, I found statistics saying that about 8-12% of those making New Year’s resolutions end up succeeding. Maybe it’s not so bad–at least those 8-12% made it, and for the rest, there’s always next year.

The problem is that starting a new calendar doesn’t mean I’ve left the baggage of the previous year behind. All the things that hindered me in the past may still be there. Any resolution that doesn’t take those things into account isn’t going to go far.

Also, if I feel the need for a change, I don’t want to wait until the New Year to start it. And if I backslide, I’m also not going to wait until the next year to start over. It’s only through setbacks and recoveries, by stringing together small successes day by day, that my larger goals have ever been met.

So I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions as such, although I do think it’s good to take time to reflect on how life is going and whether I’m living as authentic a life as I can.

The small steps I’ve been taking recently toward creative recovery include going to a coffee shop a few times a week to work on a new novella. I’m nearly done with the first draft and more importantly, I’m enjoying it.

Baby steps.

How do you feel about New Year’s resolutions? Have you made any? What helps you succeed?

Elena

Twelfth Night Customs: Wassailing the Apple Trees

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illustration of wassailing the apple trees

Illustration by Birket Foster, from Christmas with the Poets (1851)

Today is Epiphany, the day when Christians celebrate the arrival of the Three Magi (or Three Wise Men or Three Kings) with (not particularly useful) presents for Baby Jesus. In some countries, like Spain, this is still the day when children are given their Christmas presents.

While in the English tradition today, Epiphany simply marks the day when you are supposed to take down the Christmas tree and all your other Christmas decoration, back in the Regency era, Epiphany formed a very important part of the whole Christmas festivities as it marked the end of the 12 Days of Christmas.

Especially the evening before Epiphany, Twelfth Night or Twelfth Day’s Eve, was a time for fun and partying with dancing and drinking. In importance, the celebrations were second only to Christmas.

In the country, Twelfth Night was in many places the time for the custom of wassailing the fruit trees, especially the apple trees, in the orchards. The custom was common in most of the southern and western counties of England, though the date could vary, and in some places, the wassailers would visit the orchards several days in a row (hey, it’s a good excuse for a night out with your buddies!).

Typically, the wassailers would go to the orchards at night with lanterns in order to sing songs (no doubt some of them were a bit… eh… vulgar) under the fruit trees and making a great racket by beating against pans and drums. Then the trees (or just the best tree in the orchard) would be beaten with sticks, before cider was poured over the roots (the order of these actions might vary from place to place). According to popular superstition, this would ensure a fruitful year and a good harvest in the next autumn.

In Christmas with the Poets, the following lyrics are given for a typical wassailing song:

“Here’s to thee, old apple tree,
Whence thou may’st bud, and though may’st blow!
And whence though may’st bear apples enow!
Hats full! Craps full!Bushel – bushel – sacks full!
And my pockets full too! Huzza!”

If you look at the illustration above, I’d say it strongly suggests that the wassailers had to try the cider too before giving it to the apple tree (I mean, where would be the fun of going wassailing, if you can’t have a bit of drink yourself, right?)

Today, wassailing the apple trees is very popular with revivalists, who nowadays often wear costumes when visiting the orchards. Sometimes, as in Chesterfield, this is also paired with Morris Dancing:

And speaking of trees: last summer I went to the Black Forest and was interviewed by Michael Portillo about the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm for the BBC documentary Great Continental Railway Journeys. The episode with yours truly was broadcast last November. If you’d like to see me walking through a very, very muddy forest, you can check out a rather bad quality version of the interview here (the sides of the film have been cut off).  🙂

Austen vs Brontë

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Two_women_are_arguing_in_the_street_watched_by_a_crowd._Etch_Wellcome_V0040755How better to start 2016 at Risky Regencies than with a cat fight? Not a real one, of course, but a literary one pitting Jane Austen against Charlotte Brontë.

I just read Why Charlotte Brontë Hated Jane Austen by Susan Ostrov Weisser (Daily Beast, 10/19/2013) and, intrigued, looked around and found The Austen vs Brontë Smackdown on the blog Austen Pride (5/16/2009). I also found a long discussion of Austen vs the Brontës on Goodreads, which I skimmed, but did not read.

Apparently Charlotte Brontë had never read Jane Austen until a critic suggested she do so after she’d written Jane Eyre. She studied Pride and Prejudice and, among other things had this to say:

She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her: she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood…

Austen Pride makes the point that Austen, who had passed away a year after Charlotte Brontë was born, could not rebut this accusation. In Northanger Abbey, Austen did, however, parody the emotional excesses of gothic tales, of which the Brontës’ books could be included.

Of course, those of us who love Austen would also argue that there is plenty of passion in Austen’s work, although it is brimming beneath the surface. How could you not think so of Persuasion?

Austen Pride concluded that the two authors were writing from different perspectives. Austen was writing about her keen observations of the world in which she lived; Charlotte and her sisters, on the other hand, wrote what was in their imagination.

Me, I was never a huge fan of Jane Eyre. I loved the beginning when she was in the orphanage, but I never believed in the romance between Jane and Rochester. And the coincidences of falling in a ditch and being found by her long-lost cousin didn’t work for me. I also hated how Rochester treated Jane. And don’t get me started on Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff and Cathy have to die to be together? And who would want Heathcliff anyway? I preferred Edgar to Heathcliff.

I think I hold my fictional heroes to very high standards, ones that the Rochester and Heathcliff don’t quite meet. I understand the forces driving the Brontë heroes, but I much prefer heroes I can admire and even fall in love with. Heroes like Austen creates.

I also love all the finely drawn characters in Austen’s books. Their actions and feelings are much more believable to me and that gives me the sense that I’m in a real place, among real people.

But that is me, thinking on the surface of the stories, which is mostly how I read books.

What about you? Do you prefer Austen or the Brontës? Or do you like both for different reasons?

Best Wishes for 2016!

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new-years-countdown-clock I suspect that on New Year’s Day, you have better things to do than reading a blogpost at the Risky Regencies! All the same, I’m here, so whenever you are reading this, I want to say thank you for reading during this past year, and I wish you a new year filled with joy, health, luck and prosperity!

I hope you ate food on New Year’s Eve that might be thought to bring those in the coming year. My guests last night dined on:

Shrimp: symbolizing long life (Japan)

Cheeses: gold colored foods symbolize prosperity and good fortune (Asia & South America)Sweet potato-pumpkin bisque

Soup: sweet potato and pumpkin bisque (sweet and also gold colored, both considered “lucky” for New Year’s)

Pork Tenderloin: pork, and pigs, symbolize both prosperity and moving forward in the new year (Western World) pork tenderloin

Sliced carrots with waterchestnuts: foods that resemble money –coins for instance –are lucky

Parmesan potatoes: gold, again (we added a bit of food coloring), and besides, yummy!

Poppyseed muffins: poppyseeds are considered lucky in Poland.

Bread & butter pickles: coin-shaped, more or less!

For dessert we had plum pudding (with hard sauce) just because we hadn’t used all of it at Christmas, but that fits the tradition of “finishing up old matters” before the year ends. ChristmasPud4

We toasted the new year with champagne, of course. Then just after midnight we each had twelve grapes meant to signify how sweet or sour our 12 months of the year are going to be (Spain, and Spanish influenced countries). I don’t have a clock that strikes (you’re supposed to eat them on the strokes), and we figured we had a better chance of tasting a sweet year if we ate them after the tart champagne!

Mind you, these aren’t Regency customs and beliefs, just ones culled from all over the world. But the universality of some kind of traditions to bring in the new year is quite consistent. In Regency England, country people would be the most likely to observe quaint practices like opening the back door to let the old year pass out at the first strokes of midnight, and then opening the front door as the strokes ended to let the new year in. Or to make a big production over who the “first-footer” (first visitor to set foot in the house) after midnight on New Year’s Eve would be. Or to make certain nothing of substance should leave the house during New Year’s Day –in some locales, housekeepers even retained the dust sweepings and food scraps from the day until January 2!

How did you ring in the new year? Will you do anything special today? Are there old customs or traditions your family observes? However you celebrate, or even if you don’t, I wish you a year full of delightful reading and discovery of many new books and authors for your pleasure! Stay tuned here at the Riskies and we’ll try to help you with that.

New-Years-Eve-2016-Champagne-05

Happy New Year!