St. Luke's Day

Tomorrow, October the 18th, is St Luke's Day (unless you are reading this on Sunday in which case it's today and if you are reading any later than Sunday - it's gone already!) and in the books of weather sayings they always mention St. Luke's Little Summer. This is a spell of warmer, dry days that often occur around this time. As October 2026  has, so far, been warm and mainly dry anyway this won't be much of a change this year.

 Below is the illustration from the  St Luke page of the Calendar Of Saints book. The description says mosaic in S.Vitale, Ravenna.

St Luke is the patron saint of physicians and artists and wrote his own gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. He is thought to have been a doctor and went with St Paul on one of his missionary journeys. He might have been a Greek Doctor from Antioch or an Hellenic Jew (combining Judaism with Greek Culture).

Luke's gospel has some stories from the life of Jesus that don't appear in the other gospels even though it's known that he didn't witness the work of Jesus himself. It's thought he lived until aged 80+ before dying in Greece.

Luke was often in religious pictures accompanied by an ox with horns and this led to fairs being held on his feast day called 'Horn Fairs'. A notorious one was in  Charlton in Kent, where the parish church is dedicated to St Luke. Horns were the theme, there would be horns for sale and merchandise made of horn and people would wear horns on their heads. People found the wearing of horns very amusing because of their sexual link. The crowds flocked to this fair until it was condemned for it's rudeness and indecency and eventually in 1872 it was banned.