Moravian Candle Tea

The Moravian Christmas Candle Tea for 2010 concluded last weekend. A tradition in Salem, North Carolina since 1929, Candle Tea is sponsored by the Women's Fellowship of Home Moravian Church. For two weekends following Thanksgiving every year, the women of the church transform the historic Single Brothers' House into a seasonal, sensory delight. Visitors move through different rooms of the Brothers' House and experience much-loved and uniquely Moravian Christmas traditions.

Men, women, and children volunteers, outfitted in eighteenth-century Moravian dress, lead thousands of people through Candle Tea every year. Depending on the day, time, and weather, you might stand in line up to two hours before entering the Single Brothers' House for Candle Tea. Here is an oppportunity for you to get a virtual peek at Candle Tea, with no wait in line. 

When you enter the building, you are first ushered into the Ante Room, where a hostess will tell you a bit of history about the single brothers and this house where they lived in while learning their trades.

Next, you move to the Saal, or chapel, where the beautifully restored Tannenberg organ accompanies carol-singing. David Tannenberg was a Moravian master organ builder who lived in Lititz, Pennsylvania. The organ was ordered in 1794 by the Moravians in Salem; Tannenberg traveled down the Great Wagon Road four years later and installed the organ in the Gemeinhaus, or community house. The organ was used for worship services until 1864, when it was disassembled and stored. In 1964, the organ was brought out, reassembled, and installed in its current location in the Brothers' House.

After singing carols, you are escorted downstairs to watch a demonstration of beeswax candles being made, in what was the dining room for the single brothers. Moravians have used candles in Christmas Eve services dating back to 1747 - a time when Christmas Eve services were almost unheard of. These handmade candles, with their distinctive red crepe paper ruffs, are used at Christmas Eve services throughout the Moravian Church, and they are often seen in non-Moravian congregations as well.

Next, you go into the kitchen and sit on long wooden benches in front of the fireplace, and enjoy some Moravian sugarcake and Moravian-style coffee. Moravian sugarcake is a potato-based yeast bread, with a thick layer of brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter on top. Yummy!

When you have finished your cake and coffee, you proceed downstairs once again, this time to the sub-basement of the building. This is where the single brothers stored their food; it is cold and dark, the walls are over a foot thick, and the floors are large slabs of stone.

The sub-basement is where visitors see the putz, which is a German tradition of creating a miniature scene. The first room you come to features the Salem Scene: a miniature replication of the village of Salem, circa 1900. The scene is over thirty feet long, and eight feet wide. The village is built on HO-scale. All of the structures are handmade by volunteers in the church. The buildings are made of balsa wood and art poster board, and each one is handpainted to reflect the actual structures of Salem, even down to the number of slats on the sides of the buildings. The oldest buildings were built in 1949. In October of each year, a group of volunteers unpack and re-create the scene; every bit of the scene is packed up and stored after Christmas.

The second room in the sub-basement, and the last room you will visit in Candle Tea, features the Nativity Scene. Different scenes of the birth narrative from Luke are displayed in a cave-like setting (again, a food-storage area for the brothers), and the overall effect of a grotto on a cold winter night is very effective. The wooden figures in this scene were made in Oberammergau, Germany, over fifty years ago.

Book Stew

I think I am just a sucker for stacks of books. After completing my research on Virginia Woolf and To the Lighthouse, I wanted to take a picture of some of the friends who have accompanied me for the last two months, before I return them back to their homes (the libraries of the University of Tennessee, University of Miami, and Wake Forest University). What a miracle inter-library loan is. In this photo, leaning happily on the scholarly works is, of course, Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I prepared Boeuf en Daube for the class, and I relied on Julia's recipe as a starting point for my 21st century crock-pot version of the dish.

Who's Afraid....

This semester I was enrolled in a class which discussed the nature of happiness, joy, sorrow, and melancholy, and how these states relate to ethics, aesthetics, and knowledge.From August to December, we worked our way through various works of philosophers, poets, novelists, and filmmakers. My personal focus for the class was on Virginia Woolf, and specifically her novel, To the Lighthouse. Having never read Woolf previously, I will say that To the Lighthouse was not an easy read the first time through. However, after plowing through a fair amount of supplementary readings, both in books and journal articles, and frequently revisiting the text, I found To the Lighthouse offers a rich and satisfying literary experience. Woolf was born in London, in 1882, to a well-to-do, educated family. Her mother died when she was thirteen, her father died when she was twenty-two. To the Lighthouse was published when she was forty-five; it was her fifth novel; she completed nine. She was very clear that To the Lighthouse was where she laid to rest the ghosts of her parents. The work is complex; in it, one can find meaningful and interesting parallels to any number of themes: feminist theory, aesthetics, societal issues, gender roles, theology. The two papers and class presentation that I prepared on the novel looked at the symmetrical structure of the novel, the ways in which Woolf placed dichotomies together, and in particular the sacramental symbolism of the important dinner scene at the centerpoint of the book. In the dinner scene, the primary figure of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay reaches a moment of transcendence as she serves Boeuf en Daube (a rustic French beef stew) to her dinner guests.

"Just now she had reached security; she hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly...Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all around them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity" (To the Lighthouse, 104-5; Harvest/Harcourt edition).

Here, Woolf is drawing out a beautiful polarity between the everyday act of serving beef stew and an ethereal, meaningful moment. If you read the sentence carefully, you will see what else Mrs. Ramsay is serving. When I realized that this passage sits at dead center in the book (page 105 out of 209), I had my own little moment of transcendence.

For me, the most lovely passage in the book follows on page 106, as we are drawn from the dinnertime chatter and clangor into Mrs. Ramsay's inner thoughts: "...her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling. So she saw them; she heard them; but whatever they said had also this quality, as if what they said was like the movement of a trout when, at the same time, one can see the ripple and the gravel, something to the right, something to the left; and the whole is held together...For the moment, she hung suspended." I think Woolf does a marvelous job of immersing the room into eternity.

I like this quote about the dinner scene, from Mitchell Leaska in Virginia Woolf's Lighthouse: A Study in Critical Method: "Like a kaleidoscope being slowly rotated, each piece - each thought, each reverie - slips into its appropriate place to design a poised pattern of stresses and strains, an exquisite balance of human relationships" (107).