Candelmas in Chorlton, the year ahead

The meadows, December 2008

"If Candelmas Day be fair and bright,
Winter will have another flight;
But if it be dark with clouds and rain,
Winter is gone and will not come again.”*

Now I missed Candelmas which was February 2nd.

It marks the midpoint of winter, halfway between the shortest day and the spring equinox and it is a traditional Christian festival commemorating the ritual purification of Mary forty days after the birth of her son Jesus and when Jesus was presented in the Temple.

In pre Christian times, the day was the Feast of Lights and celebrated the increase in strength of the life giving sun as winter gave way to spring.**

So for our farmers here in Chorlton Candelmas was a significant moment in the farming year and as you would expect there were plenty of proverbs which had grown up around this mid point of winter.

Now Chorlton is no longer a rural community and our link with the land is pretty tenuous but I remain drawn to that period when most of us would have gained a living from farming.***

And while I suspect our farmers and market gardeners were realistic enough to know that proverbs were not always sound predictors of the coming weather many will have uttered them on the course of that day.

After all these rural proverbs were rooted in the experience of life of the countryside and will have stretched back centuries.

The meadows July 2009

So for no other reason than I like them and because I have never lost my interest in the Chorlton of the past here are a few more Candelmas proverbs.

“As far as the sun shines in our Candelmas Day, 
So far the snow will blow afore May.”

“Where the wind is on Candelmas Day
There it will stick till the end of May.”

And my own favourite which pretty much points up that we are still only midway through winter,

“Lock in the barn on Candelmas Day
Half your corn and half your hay.”

So given that Sunday was a bright sunny day with a spot of wind I am at a loss what to predict.

*quoted by H. Rider Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, Being the Commonplace Book for 1898, 1909

**Project Britain, Folklore Calendar, http://projectbritain.com/year/candlemas.html

*** The Story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20for%20Chorlton

Pictures; the meadows across the seasons, from the collection of David Bishop