Celebrating the Nativity of St John the Baptist

Yesterday was the Feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist and the always very well informed and informative Catholic website The Pillar had an article about ways of celebrating the day. I have copied this below:

Traditional St John’s fire, Brittany. Public domain.

Across much of Europe, John the Baptist’s birth was celebrated customarily on St. John’s Eve — last night — the vigil ahead of the feast, on which bonfires were customarily lit on hilltops or in village squares, ostensibly to convey the brilliant light of the prophet, who proclaimed the illuminating Christ himself.

Some countries had customs in which men competed to jump across the bonfires and women danced, others had blessings of herbs, and many customs included countryside picnics, meant to evoke that John himself lived (and ate) outside, in the desert.

I don’t think the picnics featured locusts prominently, but honey was probably a factor, and special brewed honeyed beer shows up in the St. John’s customs of some countries.

Much of this is long past in secularized Europe — and again, it was customarily celebrated yesterday — but St. John’s birthday seems like a good enough time for a liturgically-motivated family or rectory trip to the backyard firepit, especially with a six pack of Honey Brown.

The New Liturgical Movement also had articles about the dat. Their three articles about different aspects of the celebration of this important day in the ecclesiastical calendar can be seen as complementary to each other whilst entirely distinct in what they consider.

The first looks at an early text from the Vigil Mass and at a series of early fourteenth century panel paintings, from the area of Pisa and Luca, and now in Berlin, narrating the story of the Saint’s birth. This can be seen at The Vigil of the Nativity of St John the Baptist

The origins and history of the liturgy of the vigil and of the feast itself, as well as traditional popular celebrations of the day, notably bonfires, are set out in Liturgical Notes on the Nativity of St. John the Baptist

The third is an entertaining account of a revived medieval game of football played in Florence, a city under the patronage of St John, on this day. This can be seen at Florence’s Crazy Soccer Game on the Feast of St John the Baptist

This is not dissimilar, given its particular Italian - or should I say Tuscan - characteristic - to similar rough and tumble survivals in England on religious feasts, such as the Epiphany Haney Hood, or the Shrovetide games at Ashbourne, Atherstone, and Alnwick, or that of the Corfe Marblers in Purbeck. My post Shrovetide celebrations from earlier  this year has links to other articles about these games and their history.