A panoramic vista of the town of Guisborough, viewed down a valley, and surrounded by rolling hills and lush green fields. The sky is overcast with a hint of blue peeking through.

A Dreary Day, a Doubtful Saint, and Too Much Christmas

A dreary, cold day, though mercifully not freezing, but with rain looming. St. Thomas’ Day Eve—dedicated to the patron saint of doubt—drapes itself in the sort of gloom that makes you wonder why you bothered to look out the window. That housing estate west of Guisborough in today’s photo? I had been blind to its charms until now, despite the not so recent tree felling which has opened up this view in High Bousdale Wood.

We are now firmly entrenched in the season of relentless Christmas cheer. Everything is “Christmas this” and “Christmas that.” Would life have been better in the Middle Ages, when the Christmas holiday began, at the latest, tonight? Medieval folk, it seems, could not quite agree on the rules: some started on 16 December, delighting in the nine-day stretch known as the “Novena.” Emperor Theodosius, ever the bureaucrat, decreed a 14-day celebration spanning 19 December to 1st January. But the medieval mind, in its wisdom, shifted the festivities to run from St. Thomas’s Eve to Twelfth Night. Nowadays, after the Victorians grudgingly handed us the meagre Boxing Day, the season has ballooned back to medieval proportions. I wonder if the medieval scribe, hunched over his manuscripts, would have approved. Perhaps he found illuminating manuscripts no less tedious than we find replying to emails.1London Evening Standard – 25 December 1890. ‘Weird Christmases.’ https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000183/18901225/004/0002?noTouch=true

This stretch of time between St. Thomas’s Eve and Christmas Eve is also when the dead allegedly wander the earth. Us Northerners used to cling to this belief, naturally spawning a wealth of ghost stories. Charles Dickens, master of festive misery, certainly made good use of the idea.


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