Today, December 1st, is the first day of Advent in many traditions. The Advent season has the darkest and shortest days of the year in the northern hemisphere. Each day during Advent is shorter than the previous day and sun is slightly lower as it traces its way across the southern sky. When the sun stops sinking, it is the winter solstice, December 21. The traditional end of Advent is Christmas Day, December 25th.
Many theories and stories explain why Christmas is celebrated on the 25th and not on the solstice a few days earlier. I doubt them all. When Emperor Constantine converted and declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, December 25th was declared an official celebration in 336 C.E., but whether the tradition started then, or had already been practiced is not clear. Still, I am happy to celebrate on the 25th and I am glad Christmas doesn’t float around like Easter.
I can’t separate Advent from silage. By the start of Advent on the farm, Dad (Ted) had begun feeding silage from the silo. The exact date Dad opened the silo depended on the weather. As long as there was pasture enough to keep up milk production, Dad would feed grain, mostly oats supplemented with sugar beet pulp and brewer’s grain and a little hay for roughage but leave the silo untapped. Pasture could hold up as late as Thanksgiving. But by Advent, the pasture was bare, the cows were no longer interested in grazing in the rain and cold, and Dad would open the silo.
Opening the silo took a day or two and I often helped. There was always a layer of dry and spoiled silage on the top of the silo where the chopped fodder, either corn or grass, was exposed to the air. The spoiled silage had to be shoveled out with forks and thrown to the ground into the silage cart or a wheel barrow, then wheeled out to the manure spreader, and forked again into the manure spreader. When the spreader was full, we hauled the spoiled silage into the fields and spread it to fertilize next year’s crops. As I remember there was always three or four loads of spoiled silage to put out on the fields.
Silage was hard work. Silo filling was hard, opening the silo was hard, and throwing down silage to feed the cows morning and night was work through the winter and into spring. The silage was packed hard in the silo and loosening it up was a chore in itself, but there was no getting out of throwing down silage; feeding the herd came first.
Nevertheless, I liked silage. The silo was lit by a single low wattage light bulb at the top of the silo. By the time the silo was opened, the silage had sunk at least twenty feet below the rim. In the dark days of winter, in the dim yellow light from that single bulb, throwing down silage was eerie. The single melancholy bulb overhead peered down, but there was not enough light to see clearly. The chamber was muffled in silence, the only sounds coming from the shifting of the cattle in the barn, unless the wind blew just right, and the silo would resonate in a deep sigh like a giant pipe organ. I suppose you have to grow up with it, but the sharp fermented smell of ripe silage is pleasant. In the silo, I occasionally chewed a pinch of silage. The plant cellulose fibers were coarse and too rough to swallow, but the silage had a pleasant tang and enough sugars were left be palatable.
In the farm house my mother and grandmother generated the smells of Advent, baking anise Christmas cookies, pfeffernusse, lebkuchen, apple cake, fruit cake, and mince pie, but out in the barn, which was the center of a different part of life on the homestead, Advent meant silage.