The Old Year now away is fled…
Hogmanay Muted
The event was canceled in Scotland this year due to wild weather, high winds and rain that made the outdoor Fire festival untenable. Here we are having it without the customary venison steak pie because our oven has died, and will be weeks without replacement. Such is life.
So a very simple fire festival, expecting an intensifying winter. But today was warm enough to ride in the high afternoon, and I’ve plenty of wood that I’ve cut and split myself. We’ll be warm enough in the cold to come.
Black Moon Over Hogmanay
Tonight’s festivals will feature the second New Moon in a month. This is the “Black Moon,” a companion to the more-famous “Blue Moon” (i.e. a second full moon in a single month).
How the Victorians Celebrated Christmas
This is part of the Victorian Farm series, featuring some of the same people as the Secrets of the Castle and the Tudor Monastery Farm. I enjoyed this series quite a bit as well.
18th Century Hot Drinks for New Years
A bit of history interspersed with some cooking -- punch, egg nog, and hot buttered ale.
Good news updates
I wrote some days back how delighted I was to be able to help save two Corpus Christi dogs. One came to me last Friday for a short stay before he was to be picked up by transport to a rescue operation in Wisconsin. Within 24 hours he'd gotten away from me and disappeared. After 48 hours, however, he was safely caught up about a mile from here, thanks to the work of a lot of neighbors who kept watch and reported sightings. He won't even miss his transport, scheduled for Wednesday evening. I have another couple of days to try to fatten him up.
In the continuing saga of nanopreemie Riley, he went home with his parents yesterday, weighing a little over 5 lbs. He still hasn't reached his original due date.
The 12 days of Christmas on a Tudor Monastery Farm
This is part of the Tudor Monastery Farm series, which has the same experimental archeologists and historian who worked on Secrets of the Castle living on a recreation Tudor farm for a year. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Newly Relevant: US Army Equine Funeral Unit Troubled
Carter was Navy, but it's the US Army that runs Arlington, and their horse-drawn funeral unit has been having some serious problems. Somewhat ironically, as you can see from the formal photos, it's blue-cord Infantry from the Third Infantry Regiment that are running this equine operation, not a US Cavalry unit.
The plan as announced will have him buried in Plains, GA rather than Arlington, but it's very likely this unit would have been involved -- and may yet be. In any case the horses deserve better treatment than they've been getting at the hands of our Old Guard, another sign of the notable decline even in treasured elements of a once-unmatched military.
Requiescat in Pace Jimmy Carter
On the day I was born he was Governor of the Great State of Georgia, where I happened to come into the world due to my father's work having taken him from Tennessee to Atlanta. Georgia in the 1970s was far from the worst place in the world, and in fact a very nice place to grow up. For whatever he had to do with that, I thank him.
When I was young he was President of the United States. At the time I knew almost nothing about what that meant, and for whatever he did to keep a world in which children could be blessedly ignorant of politics, I thank him.
It is also due to him, at least in part, that I grew up in Reagan's America. That too is a matter of some gratitude he is partially owed.
De Mortuis nihil nisi bonum.
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