Daily Pictures #18

All Is Quiet On New Year's Day

The New Year is a very odd holiday. It is secular, almost arbitrary, and yet a set of traditions and rituals have come to cluster around it like every other celebration; but then you could almost define human beings as animals that make rituals, despite any beliefs or lack of them. It is a holiday that could be said to be only properly observed for one instant, at the stroke that changes December to January, and I know some people stay up to midnight to see it in and then promptly go to bed.

I spent New Year's Eve with family, eating pizza and chips and dip and drinking soda. We played party games (Catchphrase, Apples to Apples, Taboo) until midnight. This pretty much echoes New Year's when I was a child, except the adults ate black-eyed peas and pickled herring and drank coffee and played cards and dominoes, while the kids ran around and played and lived that parallel life just below the parents' radar, exactly like my nieces and nephews do now. Now as then at the stroke of twelve (marked in the old days by the radio, last night on cable TV) we all shouted "Happy New Year," couples kissed, and everybody shook hands. Someone in the neighborhood is sure to be letting off fireworks, no matter how dry the conditions are. The revels go on for an hour or so more, then everyone hits the road with cautions to watch out for drunks.

I am up now after about six hours of sleep (which is all I get these days anyway) and waiting for the majority of the family to wake up so I can make our special Holiday Breakfast: pancakes and bacon and fried eggs. Meanwhile I do some of my own little rituals. I've changed over my old calendar (a The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey from last year) and put up a new one (a temporary placeholder from a local real estate agent until I get a Desolation of Smaug edition). I have a bit of a quirk about calendars: I feel if you don't change the month right away that it's...well, not exactly bad luck, but a kind of stalling, backward influence on your life. I've made out a payment on an old bill from my book club (the SFBC) that's been nagging me for the past six months and that I've always put off, so I can start the year fresh and clear.

New Year's Day, no matter when it has been celebrated, has since ancient days been seen as a time to make oaths and vows, to examine one's deeds and resolve to make amends. New Year's resolutions are in this tradition, though for most of us the only promises we make are to ourselves, and we are the only ones we usually disappoint. But then, if you don't aim at the moon, you won't even reach the rooftop. New Year seems like a rather arbitrary time to resolve anything, since obviously you could make resolutions and be better for them at any point in the calendar, but something you can do anytime is all too often you won't ever do (like pay my SFBC bill!) unless you have some specific impetus to do so.

So as I await my summons to cook, I mull over a few projects I hope to work on this year. One is organizing the perpetual disarray of my image files, and keeping them in order. Another is getting the Family Archives winnowed down and put into some kind of shape. Another is to finally write up the backlog of subjects I have lined up for this blog (I seem never to like for matter, just time and energy!). I wish everyone good luck with any resolutions they might make this year. I know I shall need it.

The Boar's Head Carol

THE BOAR'S HEAD CAROL

The boar's head in hand bear I,
Bedecked with bays and rosemary.
And I pray you, my masters, be merry
Quod estis in convivio.*

Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino.**

The boar's head, as I understand,
Is the rarest dish in all the land,
Which thus bedecked with a gay garland
Let us sevire cantico.***

Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino.

Our steward hath provided this
In honour of the King of Bliss;
Which on this day to be served is
In Reginensi atrio.****

Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino.

*All who are at the feast.
**The boar's head I offer/Giving praises to the Lord.
***Serve with a song.
****In the Queen's hall.


The Boar's Head Carol was first printed in 1521, and the celebration of the Boar's Head Feast still continues at Queen's College in Oxford (the "Queen's hall"), but the song is probably older and the tradition was definitely more widespread in Great Britain in earlier times. Some folklorists connect it (and the custom of Christmas hams) to sacrifices of wild boars to the Norse god Freyr; what is certain is that as fall ended and winter began there was always a great slaughter of pigs in preparation for the lean months ahead.

William Henry Husk, in 1868, wrote of the Boar's Head Feast: "Where an amusing tradition formerly current in Oxford concerning the boar's head custom, which represented that usage as a commemoration of an act of valour performed by a student of the college, who, while walking in the neighboring forest of Shotover and reading Aristotle, was suddenly attacked by a wild boar. The furious beast came open-mouthed upon the youth, who, however, very courageously, and with a happy presence of mind, thrust the volume he was reading down the boar's throat, crying, 'Graecum est [Compliments of the Greeks!],' and fairly choked the savage with the sage."

The boar's head was served on a gold or silver dish, garnished with bay, rosemary, and other herbs, its mouth stuffed with an apple or orange. It was carried by the cooks into the hall with great ceremony, heralded by trumpets, accompanied by torchbearers, and celebrated with a choir singing the Carol. Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud write in A Dictionary of English Folklore that "Bringing in the boar's head, on a huge plate, was a potent symbol of old Christmas on a grand scale, popular with Victorian illustrators to evoke a Merrie England tradition."

The Stork: Various Views

Includes work by Scot Gustafson, Arthur Szyk, Frank C. Pape, W. W. Denslow (Thanks, Aputsiaq!), and J. C. Leyendecker.

Happy Easter 2012!

The Terrible Tale Told Out

A J. C. Leyendecker Thanksgiving

J. C. Leyendecker

If you are like me, you have probably seen the work of J. C. Leyendecker and mistaken it for that of Norman Rockwell; this is completely understandable, because Leyendecker's art and career made him Rockwell's idol and later, mentor. Many of the themes and subjects that are identified as quintessentially Rockwellian, such as America, family, and holidays, were all influenced and developed from this bachelor immigrant's work.

Joseph Christian Leyendecker was born March 23, 1874, in Montabaur Germany; his family immigrated to Chicago, Illinois, in 1882. At the age of 16 he commercially produced 60 Bible illustrations even before he had any formal training; he then studied at the Chicago Art Institute, after which he spent a year at the Acadamie Julian in Paris, where he was influenced by the work of Toulouse Lautrec, Jules Cheret, and Alfons Mucha, a leader in the Art Nouveau movement.

In 1899 he returned to Chicago and began his formal commercial career. That year he produced the first of what would be 322 covers for The Saturday Evening Post; thus began what would be a forty-four year association. In 1900 he moved to New York, the hub of publishing and commercial art. Here he developed the Arrow Collar Man, an advertising icon which along with Charles Gibson's Gibson Girl defined fashionable American society in the Twenties. His magazine covers helped develop images and traditions that stick with us today; the New Year's Baby, the chubby Santa clad in red and white, flowers on Mother's Day (his picture of a bellhop delivering hyacinths on a cover of an issue celebrating the very first Mother's Day is credited with starting it).

During the Thirties, however, his popularity began to decline. It was the Depression, and the economic situation put an end to the starched collars and elegant appointments that had fuelled much of Leyendecker's commercial art. A change of editors at The Saturday Evening Post put a damper on his relationship with the magazine, and he had fewer and fewer commissions from them; in 1943 he published his last Post cover.

Leyendecker died on July 25, 1951, and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery. Norman Rockwell was a pallbearer at his funeral, but he carried more than the body of his friend and mentor. He carried on an artistic inheritance that is still influencing culture today.