December

This page will change from month to month - perhaps you can help us with information on seasonal fruit and vegetables, seasonal dishes, observations of customs and the natural world. Contact us - e-mail info [at] commonground.org.uk.

December was the tenth month in the Roman calendar - 'decem' is Latin for 'tenth' - but they later added some extra months over the winter period where there hadn't previously been any, and it moved to twelfth, while confusingly keeping its 'tenth' name ...

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for more of December's
Calendar Customs

The Moon in December

New: Saturday 27th
Full: Friday 12th

- indicates an extract from England In Particular

Tree Dressing Day
First weekend in December. Groups and individuals show their love of mature trees in the streets, parks and gardens by ‘dressing them’ – until Twelfth Night.

"The decorating of trees is prevalent in many cultures throughout the world. Here, on and around the first weekend in December, trees in towns and villages are offered winter plumage. Tree Dressing Day is a recent addition to the calendar, challenging people to share their traditions to invent a festival in which young and old, professional and amateur can share in a social celebration of the trees in the street or on the green. This multicultural community expression for everyday nature already includes music, dance, poetry and storytelling, as well as the hanging of ribbons, shapes, shining lights - anything that draws attention to the trees we take for granted.

It began in 1990, when, to show that 'every tree counts', 150 large, cut-out numbers were hung, with the help of tree surgeons, on a group of three London plane trees at the junction of Shaftesbury Avenue and High Holborn in Covent Garden, London. This launched Common Ground's Tree Dressing Day; since then local communities, authorities, schools, colleges, arts groups, hotels, parks departments, health centres, theatres and sheltered homes have taken part, organising colourful hangings or simply gathering to read with candles under their favourite tree in the public domain." From 'Tree Dressing Day', p.415

First Sunday of Advent
Fourth Sunday before Christmas (to prepare for Christ’s coming) and the start of the Christian year.

Mistletoe and Holly Auction, Tenbury Wells
The mistletoe auctions which have taken place in Tenbury Wells at this time of year for over a century have been under threat in recent years, but a Mistletoe Festival has been established to keep Tenbury's mistletoe heritage in the spotlight, and thrives in spite of the terrible damage done to Tenbury Wells by flooding in 2007. The auction keeps its special place in the proceedings, on three Tuesdays in late November/early December.
www.tenbury-mistletoe-festival.co.uk
www.teme-mistletoe.co.uk

Vegetables : Beetroot, Brussels Sprouts and tops, Cauliflower, Carrots, Celeriac, Celery, Curly Kale, Jerusalem artichokes, Leeks, Onions, Parsnips, Potatoes, Pumpkins, Purple Sprouting Broccoli, Savoy Cabbage, Squash, Swede, Turnips.

Fruit & nuts : Comice pears. Cobnuts, walnuts. Apples include: Ashmeads Kernel, Barnack Beauty, Bramley’s Seedling, Cornish Aromatic, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Lanes Prince Albert, Upton Pyne, D’Arcy Spice, Tydemans Late Orange, Winston, Norfolk Beefing, Annie Elizabeth.

This poem appears in
Trees Be Company
An anthology of poetry,
edited by Sue Clifford and Angela King

“A much-loved evergreen tree with prickly leaves and scarlet berries, in winter the holly outranks: ‘the first tree in the greenwood, it was the holly’ the ‘Sans Day Carol’ proclaims. Cuttings brought in on Christmas Eve once protected homes from fire, lightning, witches and fairy folk. With pagan roots in Roman Saturnalia, holly was Christianised in carols that linked its red berries to the blood of Christ. But traces of the ancient Holly Boy and Ivy Girl, personifying the battle of the sexes, persist in old songs, where the prickly holly sometimes triumphs over the clinging ivy: ‘Of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown.’

Spared by farmers, since bad luck would surely follow, it is today the commonest hedgerow tree in the vast arable plains of East Anglia. In east Sussex holly trees are left to stop witches running along the hedge tops. Hollies are widely protected as boundary markers, long growing and easily identified, with lingering resonances that link cutting down with bad luck. Perhaps the evergreen tree was a symbol of life; the Green Knight is depicted holding a holly bush as a club, and some see the Cerne Abbas Giant’s club as knobbly holly.

Able to withstand grazing and cutting, hollies can form a virtually impenetrable living wall. Holly-rich hedges thrive in south-east Suffolk, especially the Shotley peninsula; around Woburn and Ampthill in Bedfordshire; and on the Chiltern dipslope in Hertfordshire, clustered around Saratt and Chipperfield. Holly hedges are also a notable feature in counties bordering the Pennines.

Remarkably tolerant of shade, hollies survive in the understorey of oak and beech woods, slowly growing up to sixteen feet, but poised to shoot up should a gap appear. Woods rich in hollies are rarely found outside Britain. Vulnerable to prolonged frost, the trees do best in damper, warmer of the South and West, or near to coasts in the East.

The importance of the tree to Hulver in Suffolk is shown in the village sign; the original name, Holieverd, means ‘green holly.’ At Staverton Park in the Suffolk Sandlings squat pollard oaks festooned with moss and ferns are joined by hollies contorted into fantastic shapes. This ‘jungle of monstrous hollies’ as Peter Marren described it, known as the Thicks, is the legacy of regular pollarding over 250 years up to 1850. The upper branches of the hollies were lopped off to provide winter fodder for livestock. Young saplings and the upper branches are particularly palatable; the trees produce prickly leaves only on their lower branches, to the height reached by cattle or deer.

Magnificent groves of old pollard hollies, once exploited in a similar way, survive at the north end of the Stiperstones in Shropshire, where crofters grazed their sheep and cattle. It is one of the few remaining examples of such holly-dominated wood pasture, known as hollins, and is perhaps the oldest stand of holly in Europe; some trees could be four hundred years old.

Another ancient and unique wood is the amazing stand of windswept holly bushes, no more than thirteen feet tall but with girths of up to 56 feet, rooted on the bare shingle at Holmstone Beach in Dungeness, Kent. Just a few acres in extent, the wood could be very old: holm derives from the Anglo-Saxon name for holly, and a royal charter of 741 alludes to a wood on the shingle roughly in its present position. The wood, which once housed a heronry, was old when the celebrated traveller John Leland mentioned it in his Itinerary of 1539.

In the Hamps and Manifold valleys in Staffordshire, old pedunculate and sessile oaks consort with holly in a classic partnership. Also in the west Midlands, a relict wood pasture, carved out of a royal forest in Sutton Park, supports sessile oaks and a luxuriant riot of holly that rivals the famous holly groves of the New Forest” From 'Holly' p.232