La Longue Veille

December 23rd - December 24th

On the long night, we reflect on all the strangenesses of the sea

In the Channel Islands, this night was given up to sitting up and spinning, knitting and netmaking to finish anything to be sold on Town Day on Christmas Eve. In the ancient British Lore that comes down, this time was Mōdraniht or Modranicht - Mother's Night, although nobody now know what that celebration meant. Some connected to carvings of three veiled figures found throughout the land. In newer traditions, this was the ghost-tide - where stories were told beside the fire and all feared to walk abroad, where the wild hunt raged against the window-shutters and storms kept fishermen from their boats. In Norse lore, the Norns were spinners who knew the secrets of fate. And in Landcraft, the wintertide turns the map downwards into the ☽✺ of the year - the great dark weather, the ocean roaring against the shore walls.

Between these hints and the sounds of needles clacking, I hear the festival of this ancient day come through: a group of older women speak in creaking voices of ancient times in ancient tongues, repeating beside the fire ancient motions of cloth-making - the nets for catching secrets, the cords for binding winds, the jumpers whose cables identify the dead - the grandmothers of us all, made of salt and stone.

photo of an ancient statue, three robed figures without faces

This is an especially auspicious night to make cords, wool, nets or other magical fibres for use throughout the year. It might also be a wise plan to assess your unfinished artisan projects (be they fibre or another art) and get finished as many as you can, packaging up and giving away the others, for the year is close to an end. The ancestors are close, perhaps a nice time to sit with your family's departed and invite them through to Christmas Day. I bring into this tradition the Ghost Story for Christmas, screened on the 24th December throughout the 1970s and recently revived. It's a nice fit for the rest here, reinforcing this as the perfect time for telling frightening tales in the dark. In the interest of compression, if you celebrate the Winter Solstice dawn you could celebrate this through the night before going out to see the sun the next day.

Arthur Rackham

In the feeling of this Tide I see the Fisher, a cthonic figure who is all that I have spoken here - her nets catch the secrets that the dead in the waters know, among the most ancient of ancestors but not exactly grandmotherly. Existing where she does on the map, her colour is the mix of blue and green and darkness that makes a murky teal (just as the bogfather, who is certainly not a consort but a spirit of a similar age and kind, is the mix of blue and green and darkness that is in deep conifer-greens), accented with white like bone and the sand and the salt and black like stone and the oiliness of fishes. She is of the blubber and the sea-glass knife and scouring your knees on goosebarnicles and the advice nobody will take. If you frown and the wind changes your face will remain that way, and nobody knows the changes of the winds seen and unseen better. She is my great, great, greatest of grandmothers, and I sit with her and she sits with me the whole night through.

Reading List

I always feel like the witch in Night Watch is very much a Fisher vibe, perhaps drawing from the ambiguities of Baba Yaga in Russian folklore.

Ghost Stories

Some good anthology television series for ghosts include:

  • Shades of Darkness (1983)
  • A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971–1978)

Folk Songs

If you do not have a community around you to sing old lore all night long, here are some particularly evocative collections of folk field recordings.

  • The Song Carriers (1965)- series of radio programs curated by Ewan MacColl documenting traditional folk-singing in Britain
  • Singing the Fishing (1959) - a 'radio ballad' combining folk song with rare-for-the-time interviews with working people, broadcast in their own voice, this one made in fishing communities