The feast of St Stephen, the Protomartyr….
Christmas Cake 2011
St Stephen is the Protomartyr of Christianity….the first martyr…his stoning is described vividly in the Acts of the Apostles…it is his particular witness that he sees The son of Man (Jesus’s term for himself in the gospels) sitting at the right hand of the Father…that particular phrase is a red rag to the bulls of the Jewish Council…. it’s an intolerable blasphemy for a Jew to describe a human standing equally with God….
St Stephen was dragged off and stoned to death…Saul (St Paul) holding their coats…very dramatic stuff since this is the first time we meet St Paul…the man who went on in so many ways to define the doctrines of Christianity and yet who was not one of the Apostles…
The feast of St Stephen was often kept with games and a hunt…in the Uk it’s also known as Boxing Day and in Ireland Wren’s Day…when mummers dressed up as hunters and chased around the town or countryside after children holding a pole on the top of which they’d placed an imitation wren…these daft pursuits were traditional ‘Christmas games’ played over the season and all the games were marked by a particularly meaningless frivolity…there was another such game in London where a boar’s head was run down the nave of St Paul’s Cathedral…no one knew why…with good reason…all these games were irreverent nonsenses….
The phrase ‘Christmas game’ is derisive when applied to everyday events… meaning something is senseless or a joke or like a prank or jest or simply foolish…
1549 when the Book of Common Prayer is promulgated it is met with derision and in the West country rebels call the prayer book….’but a Christmas game’…an accusation that arouses Thomas CranmerThomas Cranmer’s to particular and uncharacteristic choler….
By tradition in our family we always had roast beef on Boxing Day…usually rib of beef on the bone…or more often latterly Sirloin roast on the bone….
New Recipes go up on the recipe page tomorrow….
In the carol the two turtle doves…symbolically some say are meant to be the billing and cooing of the Old and New Testaments…make of it what you will…
May you like King Wenceslas’s page… tread in the footsteps of saints for the next year…