{"id":3261,"date":"2011-09-24T22:14:48","date_gmt":"2011-09-25T04:14:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3261"},"modified":"2011-09-29T15:23:55","modified_gmt":"2011-09-29T21:23:55","slug":"its-mabon-so-canta-y-no-llores","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3261","title":{"rendered":"It’s Mabon, so … canta y no llores"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The Marquez Brothers of Pueblo, Colo., playing at the Harvest Festival at the Holy Cross Abbey in Ca\u00f1on City.<\/p><\/div>\n

My approach to the eight-festival Pagan calendar works like this: the cross-quarter days are for ritual\u2014be that outdoor bonfires or black candles at midnight.<\/p>\n

The quarter days\u2014solstices and equinoxes\u2014are for public and communal celebrations:<\/strong> with the whole public, not just with other Pagans.<\/p>\n

The fall equinox offers choice of harvest festivals: the Chile & Frijoles (pinto beans) festival <\/a>in Pueblo (bigger) or the Holy Cross Abbey Winery Harvest Festival<\/a> in Ca\u00f1on City\u2014smaller but still crowded.<\/p>\n

M. and I chose the latter this year, buying elderberry jam and garlicky goat cheese and drinking Abbey wines<\/a> under the blazing sun.\u00a0 Two guys in charro outfits up from Pueblo played a ranchera<\/a>–rockbilly<\/a>–soft rock<\/a> mix, which is exactly what you expect from a Pueblo band.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Vineyard at Holy Cross Abbey, Ca\u00f1on City, Colorado<\/p><\/div>\n

Now the Myth-Making Begins<\/strong><\/p>\n

That stuff on the winery home page<\/a> about “simple Benedictine Fathers had a dream”\u2014sounds good, right? Don’t the grape vines just look right next to the Gothic Revival abbey?<\/p>\n

But the Holy Cross Benedictines were not “simple.”\u00a0 They were school teachers for the most part, running a well-respected secondary school for boys (boarding and day students) from the 1920s until it closed in 1985. Like so much Catholic education, it was a victim of demographics: not enough new monks and priests coming up, not enough church financial support to afford to pay lay (non-monastic) teachers, so no way to keep the doors open and the lights on.<\/p>\n

After that, the dwindling number of elderly monks<\/a> rented out their buildings to the community college and other users.<\/p>\n

The winery, meanwhile, did not open until 2002. It employs no monks in its day-to-day operations. The monks could not have made wine for sale in the 1920s anyway because of Prohibition<\/a>. Their mission was educational.<\/p>\n

But the idea of “monks making wine” is so appealing that in a generation people will be strolling the grounds of the abbey talking about how the Benedictines came to Ca\u00f1on City “a hundred years ago” to plant vineyards and bottle\u00a0 some good cabernet franc. I would bet money on it.<\/p>\n

It is not unlike saying that the local morris dancers or village harvest festival represent an unbroken survival from ancient Paganism instead of\u2014in either case\u2014something (re)invented by an antiquarian-minded vicar.<\/p>\n

Of course, that Chile & Frijoles Festival\u2014great street festival that it is\u2014is a relatively new creation too. This was its seventeenth year.<\/p>\n

It represents a conscious attempt by Pueblo’s elite to re-cast the city’s image<\/a> as a tourist-friendly sort of Santa Fe North, instead of the grimy steel mill town that it was for decades, dominated by union Democrats with Italian and Slavic surnames.<\/p>\n

But Pueblo does have a good climate for growing peppers.<\/p>\n

(As to the post’s title, the musicians played “Cielito Lindo<\/a>,” of course.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My approach to the eight-festival Pagan calendar works like this: the cross-quarter days are for ritual\u2014be that outdoor bonfires or black candles at midnight. The quarter days\u2014solstices and equinoxes\u2014are for public and communal celebrations: with the whole public, not just with other Pagans. The fall equinox offers choice of harvest festivals: the Chile & Frijoles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[23,26,64,127,115,5],"class_list":["post-3261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-colorado","tag-culture","tag-equinox","tag-festivals","tag-food","tag-paganism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-QB","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9791,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9791","url_meta":{"origin":3261,"position":0},"title":"Being a Solitary Pagan Does Not Mean that You Celebrate Alone","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 18, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"If you are in the Northern Hemisphere, the fall equinox (Mabon) is nearly upon us \u2014 1:54 a.m. Universal (Greenwich) Time on Sunday the 23rd. For North Americans, that is Saturday evening. What will you do if you are a solitary Pagan? At Under the Ancient Oaks, John Beckett suggests,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/chile-festival-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/chile-festival-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/chile-festival-2.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1830,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1830","url_meta":{"origin":3261,"position":1},"title":"Equinoctal Musings","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 27, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"According to the cosmic clock, I must have experienced the fall equinox about the time that I checked into the Trade Winds Motel in Valentine, Nebraska, last Wednesday evening. The next day I would be driving through miles of the Sandhills, the climax prairie ecosystem, homeward bound from the annual\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"festivals\"","block_context":{"text":"festivals","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=festivals"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7711,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7711","url_meta":{"origin":3261,"position":2},"title":"The Eagles of Candlemas","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 2, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Paganism is not the religion of the polis, but the polis (loosely defined) can support your Paganism. For the last two days, my Facebook feed has been filling up with people posting electronic clip art to the theme of \"Happy Bridget \/ Imbolc \/ Candlemas.\" Me, I spent three hours\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"birds\"","block_context":{"text":"birds","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=birds"},"img":{"alt_text":"pueblo eagle days","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/pueblo-eagle-days.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10879,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10879","url_meta":{"origin":3261,"position":3},"title":"The Ghosties Are Here Early","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 18, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"I came down to Pueblo today and stopped for breakfast at the Hanging Tree Caf\u00e9, where it is already Halloween. And here I was getting geared up for the Chile & Frijoles Festival this weekend, which is my personal autumn equinox ritual. Time is out of joint! But at the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/hanging-tree-catarina.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6979,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6979","url_meta":{"origin":3261,"position":4},"title":"Looking at Your Polis as a Pagan","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 31, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"A Wiccan email list that I am on recently went through a discussion of teaching \"theology\" to children. It is one of the perennial questions among contemporary Pagans: teach the kids or let them make up their own minds as adults. Surprisingly, some discussants reported that said adult children-of-Pagans regretted\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"childhood\"","block_context":{"text":"childhood","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=childhood"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12453,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12453","url_meta":{"origin":3261,"position":5},"title":"Wines for Esotericists","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 25, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"What has been happening over at the Winery at Holy Cross Abbey, down in Ca\u00f1on City, Colorado? They have gone hermetic! M. and I celebrated equinox season today by attending the winery's Harvest Festival. It was packed. SInce the focus is on wine, many attendees turned it into a picnic\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/the-alchemist-wine-239x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3261"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3267,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3261\/revisions\/3267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}