Picture Book Monday: A Time to Keep
21 Jul 2025 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
She recalls dancing round the bonfire for the New Year; sugaring off in March; an Easter egg tree the decorated eggs of “goose, duck, chicken, bantam, and pigeon,” with tiny canary eggs at the very tip top. (What I would give for a sight of this tree in real life!) May baskets and Maypoles in May, watching the fireworks in the nearby village from the top of the hill on the Fourth, and her daughter’s birthday in August, with a stunning two-page spread showing the cake all glowing with candles as it floats down the stream.
Even if I had a stream, I don’t believe I would ever come up with the idea of floating a cake down it, or have the guts to do it. What if the cake capsized! But this is the difference between me and Tasha Tudor: Tudor doesn’t imagine what could go wrong, but how ethereally beautiful it would be if the cake floats down the stream all right.
A Halloween party for Halloween, with bobbing for apples and “pumpkin moonshines,” as Tudor calls jack-o-lanterns; and then Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, starting with the Advent Calendar and St. Nicholas Day (with St. Nicholas cake, whose existence I have hitherto not suspected), and a walk through the woods on Christmas eve to see the Christ child in a full size creche. And then back to the house for the Christmas tree, all glimmering with candles…
All of this is quite a lot of work, of course. A full size creche does not construct itself, and a Christmas tree with candles has to be fresh cut from the woods and watched like a hawk. But so much of the joy of holidays is in the work, if you feel the work not as a task that needs to be disposed of but a part of the celebration.