I like a party that comes with instructions and the more straightforward they are the better. Christmas is a good one – ‘eat, drink and be merry’. No ambiguity there – and no mention of limits.
So I was struck by one of the traditional instructions I came across for the feast of St Martin which is celebrated today: ‘By St Martin kill your pig and drink thy wine’. It may have lost something in translation but there is something stirringly Neanderthal about this, something right up there with ‘catch woman, drag to cave, throw onto bear skin’.
The bloodier aspects of the celebration are more of a rural thing these days and most people stick to the fun bit – roasting chestnuts and drinking wine. Tradition says it should be the new wine or Água-pé (an alcoholic drink made from grape pulp which is outlawed but still available if you know who to ask). In reality anything goes. Chestnuts are like cheese and I couldn’t think of eating them without a glass of red wine or port within arm’s reach.
I don’t know how the chestnuts and wine muscled in on the celebrations but I’m not complaining. They certainly don’t appear to have anything to do with St Martin. Before finding religion he was a Roman soldier who is famed for cutting his cloak in two and giving half to a beggar during a ferocious storm. A few years later after finding Christianity he became one of the world’s early conscientious objectors when he refused to fight in a battle against the Gauls and instead volunteered to go to the front line unarmed.
In that sense he probably has far more to do with this also being Remembrance Day, the day the UK and other former Allies honour the sacrifice of soldiers killed and maimed in World War I and all the wars since. November 11 is the day St Martin was buried. It is also the day that this ‘war to end all wars’ ended. I read today there have been over 40 major wars and just 26 days of worldwide peace since then. I reckon St Martin would be seriously unimpressed by the world’s ability to remember.