November Valley

Pastor’s Epistle—November 2021

When it comes to American cultural excitement, nothing can hold a candle to the one-two punch of Halloween and Christmas. They go so perfectly together: light and dark, merry and scary, life and death. Other countries have deeply beautiful Christmas traditions, but no-one has paired them, as the States have, into such an unbeatable combination. They complement each other like peanut butter and chocolate, apples and cinnamon, sea salt and caramel.

So it’s no surprise, really, that as soon as the sun rises in the wee morning hours of 1 November, our entire culture—stores, music, media, bookshelves, Starbucks—abruptly shifts from wicked fear to Yuletide cheer. Halloween and Christmas are like two great, vertiginous peaks we so eagerly climb, and from the summit of the one we can most clearly see the other.

Yet take a moment to look down from that height, and you’ll notice a lovely valley nestled between the two, replete with overlooked but charming features of its own. November is that valley: a month of strange and wondrous holidays typically lost in the shadows of Samhain and Santa.

We start off with All Saints and All Souls, the infamous Days of the Dead. These indeed are the reasons why Halloween exists in the first place. All Saints honors the great heroes and teachers of Christian history, while All Souls tenderly recalls those of our families, our loved ones, who have passed beyond the veil before us, to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. No-one does the Day of the Dead better than Mexico, and it makes me smile to see such rich traditions slowly moving their way north.

5 November (remember, remember) brings Guy Fawkes Night, an English tradition of bonfires and pyrotechnics to which we owe a lot of Halloween’s mojo. Rarely practiced now outside the UK, it was once popular amongst American Colonials; and George Washington had to put the kibosh on it for fear that the religious overtones of the festival would cause division between Protestant and Catholic troops within the Continental Army.

11 November is Martinmas, in remembrance of St Martin of Tours. Martin was a horse-soldier for the Roman Legions, who split his cloak one winter’s night to share with a homeless beggar. That beggar turned out to be a vision of Jesus Christ, and Martin would go on to become not only the patron saint of horsemen but of soldiers-turned-peacemakers as well. It’s no coincidence that the Armistice ending the Great War in 1918 fell on St Martin’s Day—so that we should know Martinmas as Veterans Day today.

Then comes Thanksgiving, of course, that fourth Thursday in November. Thanksgiving has a fascinating pedigree, and not what we’ve been taught in school. The Puritans of New England would proclaim feast days and fast days in response to events good or ill during the course of the year. Their grandchildren got used to a regular thanksgiving declaration following each harvest—a winter meal that looked suspiciously like Christmas, amongst a people who purportedly did not celebrate such things.

Following the Civil War, this New England Thanksgiving became a nationwide holiday celebrating union and shared origins: thus the Pilgrims, of all our prospective national founders, became America’s origin myth of choice. Yet however convoluted its beginnings, Thanksgiving’s themes of gratitude, family, and the sharing of abundance have proven remarkably resistant to commercialization—Black Friday sales notwithstanding.

The last Sunday in November typically marks the First Sunday of Advent, the Church’s time of quiet, hopeful, humble expectation: stilling our minds, our souls, and our lives in preparation for the Christchild. For as much as our culture loves Christmas—in recent years I’ve seen holiday albums on sale in September—Advent remains a much-needed corrective to a hectic, stressful season. We must learn to do less at the holidays, to softly lay distractions aside, and to prepare our hearts for the Nativity of our King.

Then at the end of it all we have St Andrew’s Day, 30 November, which is pretty big in Scotland. I haven’t much to say of this: one tradition is to go duck hunting; another is that vampires become active on St Andrew’s Eve. It’s kind of a hodgepodge, honestly. For most of Europe it marks the start of the holiday season, the Christmas season—as really it does for us as well. Once we’re past Thanksgiving, we’re off to the races, aren’t we?

So there you have it: a veritable grab-bag of strange and unusual holidays, each charming in its own way, and each quite distinct from both Halloween and Christmas. My recommendation, as it always is this time of year, is simply not to get ahead of ourselves. Don’t rush into the next holiday, lest we grow sick of Christmas before Christ has yet the chance to be born.

November marks the end of autumn and first of snows, such that she has a muted, cozy beauty all her own. Let us take the time to enjoy it; and to find God, as ever, in the silence.

In Jesus. Amen.