Coolmint Matchmakers

After the symbolism and metaphors I have carefully woven into recent blips I thought I'd try to do it again.

Firstly long time readers will again be looking for the colour green when it comes to my mention of metaphors and here I can assure you that the box is green and while we've discounted the relationship between metaphors and the colour green we've got it covered here; just in case.....

Chocolate ties together two of the major festivals which celebrate change and rebirth. In the Christian calendar, Christmas and Easter and in the Pagan calendar on which the Christians based their festivals we have the winter solstice celebrated as Saturnalia, Yule, Hogmany and so forth. This celebrates the shift from days getting to shorter to days lengthening again (in the Northern Hemisphere). Later in the year we celebrate the rebirth of the Earth after her winter slumbers.

It is postulated that the Anglo-Saxon goddess Oestre may have been the centre of this celebration and given her name to the later Christian festival which happens around the same time. Oestre's other job was looking after the dawn or fertility or something. I must admit that as I started researching this stuff I became distracted by the sheer welter of vitriol on both sides of the arguments around the whole Easter/Oestre/Ostara shtick. It seems that Bede is involved and Jacob Grimm and all sorts of other moody runners have chipped in but I like the image of Oestre from Ernout and Meillet, who give us "...it has been suggested that her lights, as goddess of the dawn, were carried by hares. And she certainly represented spring fecundity, and love and carnal pleasure that leads to fecundity." in their Dictionnaire Etymologique de la Langue Latine (1980). Whether the name thing is a fallacy or not it's a jolly interesting area of dispute.

Thus I am blipping chocolate to symbolise how these festivals are linked and the idea of fertility and carnal pleasure because they are the themes of Spring which is just around the corner (if you are prepared to ignore the next few months). I am also blipping chocolate to show that I am a man with iron resolve; I still have chocolate left this deep into the New Year! I do know that some folk have already run out.

How a quick blip got this far out of hand is beyond me but I need food. Tomorrow is Friday mes amis and I know that I speak for many of us when I say that it can't arrive too soon; it's been a long week for those of us who returned to work this morning. Friends who are giving up booze for January you have my utmost respect. I'm not sure that I could face January without the knowledge that there will be beers and glasses of wine hidden amongst it.