FESTIVE TRADITIONS

Santa Parade Dunedin NZ

 

It was six months before christmas, and all through the house, you could smell christmas-cakes baking, and hear words so pronounced:

“Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”

You see, it snows in about June, here in the Southern Hemisphere. And that is about the time I will start to prepare for christmas: dusting off my christmas spirit, and rolling up my sleeves to make new decorations and boozy cakes. 

Every family seems to have their own traditions set around holiday seasons. My own family would watch the local santa parade, and attend the various pantomimes, before gathering our small bunch of kin together at my grandparent's house for roast fowl and mashed potatoes. 

I have slowly been forming my own christmas traditions, carried out with joie de vivre well before the big day...

 

ZOE'S CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS:

1. Consume anything to do with christmas: books, movies and songs.
2. Choose a pine tree to cut down from the nearby forestry, then lug it home on a wheelbarrow in the summer heat.
3. String up popcorn and cranberries.
4. Go christmas window shopping, and gaze at all those stars and spangles.
5. Make a wonky gingerbread cottage, with paned windows and royal icing roofs.
6. Spread glitter all over the floor while making christmas cards.
7. Set out a multitude of homemade and hand-me-down decorations.
8. Attend the candlelight service on christmas eve.
 
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OLD CHRISTMAS SONGS

Best Old Christmas Songs List

There is something about the mention of bells and mistletoe, and of sleigh rides in white snow, that makes me so nostalgic. Especially when it is being sung in dulcet tones.

You must admit, there is a magical quality that surrounds Christmas, and it is this quality that makes me love it so.

I like to honour that feeling all year round, by singing Christmas songs while I peel the potatoes for dinner... happily humming along to the trilling of Bing Crosby or the lulls and melodies of Judy Garland. 

SOME OF MY FAVOURITE CHRISTMAS SONGS:

 

“Cause I’d trim trees, and deck the hallways

If I knew you’d be mine, for always.”
— Julie London
“...and wish on a silver star...”
— Suzi Miller
“Cause no matter how far away you roam,
when you pine for the sunshine of a friendly gaze,
for the holidays you can’t beat home sweet home.”
— Perry Como
“There’s nothing sweeter and finer,
When it’s nice and cold I can hold,
my baby closer to me...”
— Peggy Lee

DELFT BLUE

Delft blue and white china print dress
“ The pagoda’s roof curls beyond the lake-view glazed

in reproduction blue on serveware matched to the

butter dish, the gravy boat, the once-a-year-feast—no

Villeroy & Boch, but good enough, herr doctor, to fake

the recherché look. Pastorals stand for the village, and

candles, like black trees in Brothers Grimm, script

happiness we can drown in.”
— Blue Transferware - Karen Rigby

It is the year 1639. A large ship arrives in Rotterdam's bustling port, in the Netherlands. The cargo is unloaded: a treasure-hoard of lacquered tea-sets, hand painted wallpapers, and porcelain vases, from the far-off climes of China.

Elsewhere in the city, in an old brewery building, a potter is lost in his work, painting a white layer onto many tiles. In the corner there are stacked tiles upon tiles: blue and white. Blue and white. Each one holds a scene: some with flowers, others with windmills, and others still with exotic traceries of plumed birds resting in branches of blossoms. The sign above the workshop reads:

 

Delfts Blauw - Porcelain Pottery, 
The Guild of St. Luke.

 

It was exactly this movement of china bowls, jugs, dishes, and other luxuries, shipped to the Netherlands by the East India Company, that stirred up a vogue in Europe for all things exotic. In England, as in France, the elite sat in their wallpapered parlours and drank Chinese tea out of porcelain cups.

“Tea drinking was a fundamental part of polite society; and chinoiserie rose from the desire to create appropriate settings for the ritual of tea drinking.”
— David Beevers

The many potteries of the Netherlands picked up on this mode for chinoiserie, the love of the exotic, and began to imitate the glazed and lacquered look of the porcelain dishes being imported. Potters in places like Delft and Rotterdam refined their techniques, applying a tin-glaze to their plates and tiles, before painting them with a mix of calcined cobalt ore, quartz sand and potash. Thus, the beautiful illuminated whites and deep blues of 'Delfts Blauw' was born unto the world, and then imitated in all manner of chinoiserie furnishings and wallpapers. It was not until the 1700s that porcelain began to be made in Europe, and until then, the Delft Blue potters provided an earthenware equivalent for much less. 

The images on Delft serve ware have always evoked a kind of fairytale quality, depicting idyllic scenes of...

Farms and windmills, children at play, ships at sea, flowers & fruit, and biblical scenes taken from engravings.
All of this set alongside a hint of the foreign; of parasols, pagodas, long-legged cranes, and willow patterns.