Michaelmas: The Best Holiday You Might Not Have Heard Of
Eating blackberries and defeating Satan. Cool!
Imagine each year as a funnel.
It begins wide open, time swirling slowly, lazily, as though it is unlimited. The months scrabble by, and the funnel narrows. Time speeds up. Days get longer. Vacations end. Kids slouch back to school. Then come the final months, whizzing by, shooting through the funnel’s spout at Top Gun speed.
This is how I feel every September, knowing I am rushing toward what is called The Holiday Season.
Maybe you feel the same. Maybe you are looking for ways to make your Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas less stressful. There is plenty of advice on how to do just that.
Sometimes, the advice is to opt out, as the Mayo Clinic recommends in tip #2 on this list. Another article, this one from Woman’s Day, expresses the sentiment three different ways:
Enforce boundaries
Drop expensive, high-stress rituals
Just say “no”
From my wife, I learned the opposite: celebrate MORE holidays. This will require branching out, being creative. Perhaps it will involve reviving holidays that once were popular but that have slipped beneath the ocean of obscurity, leaving only a ripple.
And, boy, do I have a good one to bring back: Michaelmas.
Michaelmas, pronounced “mick-ul-muss,” is a holiday celebrated on September 29 in Western Christian traditions (November 8 for Eastern Orthodox observations). The name is an abridgement of Michael’s Mass — like “Christmas” from Christ’s Mass — and the day has been celebrated since the fifth century, when a Roman basilica was dedicated in honor of Saint Michael the Archangel.
Michaelmas is associated with the beginning of autumn and the shortening of days. In medieval England, it was one of the quarter days, when accounts had to be settled between lords and tenants. In Ireland, the day was considered a “gale day” — i.e., when the rent was due — as well as a day for contracts or other legal transactions.
Sounds boring, right? Except remember who Michael was: the Angel of the Lord, who was sent to Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and other leaders during times of trouble. When Lucifer rose up against God, declaring that he was just as important as God and should therefore rule Heaven, there was a Great War, and Michael cast him out.
This is the event that Michaelmas commemorates. It’s an epic tale — Supernatural got two whole seasons out of it — and one of the best origin stories of any holiday. Ever.
How do people celebrate Michaelmas? Same as any other holiday: lots of food!
One traditional Michaelmas dish is a type of bread called bannock, a flat, unsweetened cake made with oatmeal or barley flour and typically unleavened. It is often topped with cream and blackberries. Legend has it that, when St. Michael tossed out Satan, the latter landed in a blackberry bush, cursing that particular fruit. (This is why bygone generations didn’t eat them after September 29.)
Another treat is Michaelmas pie, made from blackberries and apples. An old Irish custom is to hide a ring in the pie. Whoever finds the ring will enjoy an early marriage.
Roasted carrots are also popular. According to Scottish custom, women harvested wild carrots on Michaelmas by digging triangular holes with a three-pronged mattock. The holes symbolized St. Michael’s shield, the mattock, his trident.
Lastly, no Michaelmas feast would be complete without a roast goose. In 1575, the English poet George Gascoigne described the tradition thusly:
And when the tenants come to pay their quarter’s rent,
They bring some fowl at Midsummer, a dish of fish in Lent,
At Christmas a capon, at Michaelmas a goose,
And somewhat else at New-year’s tide, for fear their lease fly loose.
There is also a Prayer to St Michael the Archangel. Ordered by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 to be offered after Low Mass, the prayer was made optional in the 1960s.
Pope John Paul II recommended the prayer in 1994, urging people “to recite it to obtain help in the battle against the forces of darkness and against the spirit of this world.” The prayer is as follows:
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him we humbly pray; and do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly host, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.
How stunning is that?
A statement that is often attributed to Billy Graham goes like this: God never removes something from our lives without replacing it with something better.
This has been my wife’s and my mantra vis-à-vis our two sons. Naturally, we wanted them to avoid drugs, gangs, and other bad influences. But we couldn’t leave a void and trust them to fill it. We had to offer something better.
We did this by going all out for holidays. The attics of two houses are filled with our decorations. We’ve gone trick-or-treating at an American embassy and stood under the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. Our wedding date is October 31. Heck, we celebrate Hanukkah by cooking latkes and studying Jewish traditions.
Some may see this as appropriation. Others, like psychologist David DeSteno, see value in cultural cross-pollination. Writing in the New York Times about another Jewish holiday, Rosh Hashanah, he says:
Unlike so many other New Year’s traditions, the Jewish holiday asks those who observe it to contemplate death. The liturgy includes the recitation of a poem, the Unetaneh Tokef, part of which is meant to remind Jews that their lives might not last as long as they’d hope or expect . . . There is a lesson and an opportunity here for everyone. Contemplate death next Jan. 1 (or whenever you celebrate the start of a new year). Any brief moments of unease will be well worth the payoff.
In other words, there is more to gain than lose by respectfully observing traditions beyond the ones you were raised in.
When my wife found out about Michaelmas, she was thrilled. We now have daisy-patterned and blackberry-patterned china, as well as a painting of St. Michael. Have I ever cooked a goose? No. But I’ll give it a whirl.
Holidays can be religious, yes, but they are also meant to be fun. Christians need more fun. If we were more celebratory and less thou-shalt-not, maybe our faith would stop losing members in droves.
So raise your glasses — of blackberry brandy! or maybe just ginger ale — to Michaelmas, the best-kept secret on the holiday circuit.
(Written with Mariah Warren)
