The Craft: A Feast of Fools

This year our family Solstice celebration was the best gift that I received.  It gave us a window of time, cut out and protected from the commercialization of Christmas, to honor what we source from Winter and its longest nights of the year: depth, quietude, stillness, hope, peace, vulnerability, and reliance.  Our winter solstice celebration felt like a (weighted) blanket of fresh snow covering us in quiet and calm - regulating our individual nervous systems as well as our family system.  Being dirt worshipers, Winter Solstice is our spiritual New Year.  We feel and celebrate the sun-standing-still moment as a pause worthy of all of our attention.  For what follows it is truly the gift that keeps giving.  From that moment on sunlit hours in our days will slowly and gradually grow.  Just a minute at a time but before we know it full hours of extra sunlight will be tacked onto our days.  Nature, through her cyclical masterwork, gives us the gift of Time.  The gift that famously money cannot buy.  What a refreshing experience to counteract the reverberations of frenzied consumption all around us.  It is a gift we do not take lightly.

We revel in it by keeping track of it with our phenology journals.  We watch it grow, with awe, like a resource accruing interest.  Yet always remembering that its benefit must be appreciated in the moment. We'd better wake up and live each day like we mean it because six months from now will begin the slow drain, the inevitable wane, of our precious daylight.  This cycle is another healthy natural process that doesn't give a darn about our little human plans, needs, and desires.  It is an experience that, if we allow it, puts us in our place.  (We found the most WONDERFUL story illustrating exactly this point by Erica Baron).  For me this is the other real gift of this and all the seasons - a chance to understand where we fit in a much larger web of interconnected life.  Authentic humility. 

Of course, a reverent and reflective Solstice celebration is not the only way to explore perspective and find one's place in the larger order of things.

There is the other path.  The one paved with irreverence, social satire, role reversal, and serious silliness.  The unruly compliment to Winter's silent and holy nights - the hearty and hilarious Feast of Fools. 

I will never forget our children's delight when we first introduced them to the winter traditions that celebrate down right silliness.  Saturnalia, Twelfth Night, Feast of Fools...all the old ways dedicated to shaking up the heavy stillness of deep winter.  Celebration that, at least for one night, brings into question pretty much everything we routinely follow in our daily lives.  A feast of fools is a child's dream come true - adults meeting them, for an entire evening, in their expansive domain of imaginary play where they and the best of their childhood attributes rule.  Talk about shedding perspective on "one's place".  I can attest to the surge of humility the comes with embracing role reversal traditions and giving your children the crowns and sceptres for a night.  By submitting to their rule one is granted in equal share laughter and wisdom. 

Needless to say, of all our family's "Feastivals", this one is without exception the children's very favorite.  This year we took on a commitment to craft our Feast of Fools with the smallest footprint possible.  We wanted to prove to ourselves that we could stomp loudly for a night of raucous revelry while simultaneously upholding our commitment of "stepping lightly" when it comes to the environment.  

Fool's Gold

We agreed on two new purchases - the smallest (6-pack) of environmentally-unfriendly new years poppers and one bag each of "fools gold" (chocolate gold coins).  The rest, it was declared, had to be crafted from what we already had.  

The kids made magic of that task and our entire celebration:

One big bag of bling.

We have one gallon sized ziploc bag full of reusable table scatter that has been gradually growing in size and sentimental worth each year.  It never loses its luster but rather grows in value like Christmas Tree ornaments.  Seen only once a year, excited little fingers rush to be reunited and find favorites...inevitably the pile of plastic trinkets become story prompts about foolish feasts of the recent past.  I always marvel at how much time is spent and how much joy is created in the task of making of the King's/Queen's Cake:

The cake is eaten first (of course)!  Traditionally, whomever finds the bean in their piece of royal cake becomes the ruler of the Feast of Fools for the night.  To avoid the night devolving into a tiny-tyrant game of thrones we avoid any sibling power struggle and, no matter where the bean shows up, brother and sister are both crowned - King and Queen of Fools!  We use this chant from a Mummer's Play of old :

Parents: "We have a King and Queen!  The Fool's King and Queen!  The Lord and Lady of the Feast!  Here is the staff of the New Year!"

Kids: "WE have the staff of the New Year! Overthrown, overthrown!" 

Parents: "The King and Queen of Fools!"

And most importantly... 

 All: "Omnia Tempus Habent!"  (There is time for everything!)

Waverly Fitzgerald's Living in Seasons was our entry point into researching and eventually handcrafting our own annual feast of fools.  We impose minor restrictions on the young monarchs (no one can get sick or hurt from their commands!) otherwise it is a night that the kids dictate. We believe - the more foolish the better!  After dessert and dinner our night often includes an untalent show followed by a family dance party.  There is always the east coast count down at 9 pm as an exciting conclusion.  We have a stash of homemade instruments and noise makers that help ring in the New Year.  They are a great reminder that with all the plastic we humans have already created we definitely don't need to buy any more!  All of the instruments below were handcrafted from recycled materials.

Shaker: Cardboard canister with plastic lid,
dry beans and cast off tissue paper from christmas presents! 

Swivel rattle: Yogurt cup, old tea light tins, wooden stick, wire.

Left: Drum! Giant icecream tub painted and strung with shoulder strap.
Right: Rattle! Old light bulb covered securely in masking tape and then broken.  

In exploring the old traditions, we are forever sold on the idea that a whole hearted embrace of being foolish is the best way to start a new year.  In fact, the only resolution I set the morning after is to stay in touch with the wisdom of the fool, the one willing to optimistically step into the great unknown.  I don't spend January 1 creating rigid rules about how I will inflict needed change upon myself and my life.  I spend it washing whipped cream sprinkles from the floor as well as my daughters hair and feeling gratitude for wisdom that is available every day that I live graced by their childhoods.  After the revelry, quietly by myself, I thank the fool, the child of wonder, and winter itself.  I pack away the accoutrements and bid Adieu to Noel carrying the feeling of renewal forward.

Adieu Noel

Noel is leaving us,

Sad to say,

But he will come again,

Adieu Noel.

His wife and his children 

Weep as they go;

On a grey horse

They ride through the snow.

The Kings ride away

In the snow and the rain;

But after 12 months,

We shall see them again.

- French Epiphany Carol