Latter-Day Martinmas
For all those of you fretting that the Christmas lights went up a week ago and the songs started playing in the shops even before that, when everybody (at least in the United States) knows that you shouldn't start worrying about Christmas until after Thanksgiving, it may be reassuring to realize that we Americans actually start the Christmas season somewhat late. Okay, so friends in England have been making the same complaint about the precocious tendencies of town councils and retailers to want to get us thinking about Christmas, but eight hundred or a thousand or even twelve hundred years ago, they, too (that is, the town councils and retailers) would already have been behind. According to certain Carolingian sources (which I would reference if I hadn't left them at work, but one of them was Theodulf of Orléans' instructions for parish priests, I'm pretty sure), there were three major fasts during the liturgical year, each lasting forty days: a fast before Easter (a....