November Country Days

 

A November page from The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady by Edith Holden

   If there's ice in November to bear a duck

The rest of the winter is just mud and muck.

  

November takes its name from the Latin novem because it was the ninth month of the Roman year. The Anglo Saxons named November "Blodmonath" meaning Blood Month, maybe because this was the month when any older livestock would have been slaughtered before winter, so as to save fodder for the younger animals.

 Dull November brings the blast,
Then the leaves are whirling fast
(Months of the year by Sara Coleridge )

 

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 I love the fitful gust that shakes

The casement all the day,

And from the mossy elm-tree takes

The faded leaf away,

Twirling it by the window pane

With thousand others down the lane.

 

I love to see the cottage smoke

Curl upwards through the trees,

The pigeons nestled round the cote

On November days like these,

The cock upon the dunghill crowing,

The mill-sails on the heath a-going.

(John Clare)

Samhain which means "summers end" was the Celtic fire festival celebrated as the day shifted from October to November. The end of the light half of the year. Celts considered sundown as the start of a day, which is why although Samhain is November 1st, it would have been celebrated at sundown on the 31st. It was their new year and fires would have been lit on the hilltops to drive out the evil of  the last year and welcome in the new. Then later came the Christian feasts of All Saints on the 1st and All Souls on November 2nd, when the dead are remembered in prayers.

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