The Unholy Trinity
Three essays on who made the season up.
Three of the autumn’s great nights fall inside a single week: Halloween on the thirty-first, Lewes Bonfire on the fifth, and on the first Friday of November, at one minute to nine, the evening Denmark declares Christmas open.
Three nights in a week, and in each one something that looks old turns out not to be. Each of these essays takes one of them apart, and the beer is the evidence.
The question is not whether anything here was invented. Something in each of them was. The question is who did the inventing, and how far that was from the people who keep it.
The overture, six weeks earlier
The same audit, run on a festival that is not in this week and not even in the month it is named after:
September is Oktoberfest, on a royal wedding with an
agricultural show bolted on a year later, a beer chosen for being the oldest in the cellar rather than the
newest, and four countries that cannot agree what is in the glass. It is also where the green hop that
Part One goes looking for gets its first mention, and the reason nobody has built a festival on it.
Season of the Witch
A 1939 article in Folklore turned a leafy face on a church corbel into the survival of a pagan fertility cult, under a name that was already on the pub signs and already in print. Folk horror took it up, the comics took it further, and the one part nobody could evidence is the part that stuck. Also: why pumpkin ale was a poverty measure, and why green hop beer follows the picking schedule rather than Halloween.
Established by an outsider, and nobody asked the pubs.Voice of the Fire
Lewes burns a Pope who had nothing to do with the Gunpowder Plot, for reasons invented in the 1850s, in a celebration that had already lapsed once and been rebuilt by young men with tar barrels. It is still the most honest festival in England, and the brewery that makes the beer for it is inside the town.
Invented by the people who keep it, in public, and they are still arguing.The First Friday of Christmas
A Norwegian king once made brewing Yule ale compulsory, on pain of losing your farm. A thousand years later a Danish brewery set a date for the start of Christmas, and later moved it to one minute to nine on a Friday night. In between, an American brewed a Christmas beer in 1975 because he had looked for the tradition and concluded it was gone.
Invented by a marketing department, in 1990, and never pretended otherwise.