Month: December 2012

Getting ready for Christmas

Getting ready for the holidays has been different this year, no surprise. Even though we’ll have three solid weeks of grandparents visits spanning the kids’ two week semester break (the day we take Tom’s mother to the airport we’re collecting my parents) and although I’ve had to navigate my cluelessness about where to shop in London, I’m feeling prepared.

Partially, I’m less busy than usual. I spend most of my days when Weyland is at preschool working on my database of early Tudor monuments and effigies, but I also have time to take care of house cleaning,  cooking,  shopping and such. I’m not in charge of any Christmas pageants this year, so I don’t need to sew, rehearse, build scenery, coerce volunteers, find more singers, or encourage actors. We’re part of a singing group that is casual and fun with no holiday gigs. There are no “historic Christmases” happening that I should be volunteering in costume at this year. I’m rather surprised to see that we’re so far into December, because there is so little stress and madness around me, both in my home and on the streets of the city. Back home I’m used to feeling “booked” from late November on.

We didn’t have Thanksgiving. At all. We had a video chat with my family and then Tom’s brother, but there was no fancy dinner, no travel, no time off school. That is one thing that shocked me when I first looked at the school calendar: it is so orderly. You start in early September, go until a one week break in October, and go again until a two week break in December. No holidays, teacher workdays, or wiggly calendar. With the exception of the first week of the quarter when the teachers get Monday to set up, either you go to school that week or you don’t. They get quarterly bank holidays off, too, but that won’t occur during a week that isn’t already a break week until next May. One day next February they have off so that parents and teachers can have conferences. It is so simple, straightforward, and UNLIKE the school calendars I’m used to in North Carolina!

I don’t have many parties to attend. Moving brings with it a chance of being a tad lonely; thank goodness for the SCA. We have weekly SCA singing practices that nourish both my social and my musical sides. We have monthly “revels” (themed afternoon learning something, followed by a potluck feast in garb and dancing and maybe singing). At the Christmas revel last weekend I got to sing a good pile of music, mostly holiday and mostly pre-1625. Weyland seemed to love the dancing. Dragging a toddler around while learning new 15th-century dances is a bit awkward, but his giggles more than make up for it. That was the sort of Christmas party I wanted to attend. Tom’s company party, where I would know no one and would have to find a babysitter on a school night, I skipped. No idea how to find a sitter here, other than to sign up for some expensive service. I just don’t know many neighbors or any teens.

Taking care of the Christmas prep at home is almost entirely my job. I have almost all the Christmas presents ordered, bought, procured…um, except for the handwork that I’m obviously putting off doing just now. Some of it we’re getting “imported” via grandma. Our DVD player and Wii won’t play the movies and games we can buy in the UK, so I’ve  shipped orders to my mother-in-law. Most shopping I’ve done online. I’ve pulled off two successful in-store toddler distractions where I let him choose a toy and got him to forget about it by the time we walked out. The one today was really funny, in part because I didn’t think I’d be able to do it. He is a train nut. When he saw the Chuggington-themed playdough set, he announced that it was “MY Chuggington toy that I going take MY house.” When I walked out without buying it — cashier needed to do a price check and we needed to find the only nearby toilets across the street at McDonalds — I guess he gave up. Somehow it didn’t connect for him that we went straight back to that store, to that cash register. The transaction and bagging happened on the counter above his head, AND I quickly refocused him on choosing a chocolate at the discount store next door where I was picking out candies for future gingerbread decorating.

I’ve been slowly acquiring the necessities for holiday cooking and baking, and planning meals that will appeal to my extended family. Gingerbread potentiality is now under control. However, I do NOT understand why I cannot buy chocolate chips in huge and inexpensive bags like I can back home. Don’t Brits know how amazing home baked chocolate chip cookies are?

Decorating the house has been a real conundrum because of what got left stateside. Almost everything got put into storage when we moved except what fit into our attic and outside storage shed. When we realized that we were going to have a huge shipment sent by sea, I asked a neighbor to collect a small number of items from our house and take them to the storage facility to be shipped. Thanks to her efforts the boys have bikes, scooters, trikes, bows and arrows; I have a suit coat that I forgot and one shoe of Weyland’s that got left in the corner of a luggage item we decided at the last minute not to bring; and I asked for the one really important box of Christmas ornaments and stockings. The little china village, the Christmas books, the wrapping paper and bows, and the tree stand got left behind — and the last item has made me shake my head over my poor planning. I suppose I was thinking that we’d somehow acquire an artificial tree while here, but no go — the only ones that look passable also cost something like $100 and up. The real trees are also expensive, but I signed up months ago for a couple of those daily deals emails, and through one of those got a tree “80% off with free delivery”. We’ll see how good it looks when it shows up, but it is at least a start. I figured that I was paying so little for the tree, give up and buy and inexpensive stand for it.

And now my unsolved problem: the lights. I actually have strings and strings of tree lights, but they won’t work here. If I were to plug them in, even with a “tourist adapter” so that they’d go into the wall, the difference in voltage would, I think, fry them. Lights are EXPENSIVE, and if I bought proper British ones I’d only be able to use them one year. We only have two voltage converters in the house, and they’re in use. Hmmmm….

Doing much more decorating is out of the question, since nails to hold garlands would displease the landlady. We might get around to making paper chains and snowflakes and just taping them on the walls, but I think my always subdued decoration scheme will be even more scaled back this year. Which at least means less cleanup.

The reduced decor will blend well with our British surroundings. Here is the extent of the “Christmasy” at the closest mall-like collection of stores. This is so unlike the huge trees decked with gaudy kid-sized baubles and the little animatronic snow-covered scenes that I grew up seeing at Hanes Mall that I almost want to laugh in relief.

Although at my house there has been much rehearsing of the trombone part of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” (which mostly sounds like blorp, blorp, blorp, even when Garrett gets it right) I have heard hardly any Christmas music in stores. When I do, it isn’t the blaring Christmas music of the 60s and 70s, and so I’ve not really been bothered. No one’s grandma has gotten run over by a reindeer (shudder) within my earshot, and no little kids are bragging about how they’re going to blab about momma kissing Santa. Because divorce proceedings at the holidays are just SO in tune with the Christmas spirit.

You know, I was in a better mood before I started remembering what Christmas is like back in the U.S.

Crunching through Data

For two weeks I have inched my way through thousands of data points, trying to make sense of where I will travel to look for costume information. Late this week I hit my stride, and data editing took over my brain. I couldn’t walk past the computer without wanting to work. I put off eating, wanting to get just that little bit more accomplished, to run one more search, and oh maybe I wasn’t THAT hungry…. I displayed a similar disregard for the concept of a “sane bedtime.”

My goal is to recreate women’s costume between the time at which the English gable hood became fashionable (probably the late 1490s, when Elizabeth of York was queen) and the time when nobles began flipping up the lappets, like the women here. I want costume during the reign of Henry VII, not his son Henry VIII. No matter how often people refer to Henry VIII’s reign as “early Tudor,” his dad did some fantastic work stabilizing the English monarchy for 25 years before the young, unprepared king took the throne in 1509. Not many costumers try to research Henry VII’s reign, because there aren’t many portraits painted during this time. Holbein didn’t show up in England until 1526 to paint Henry VIII’s queens and leading nobles. There was almost no illumination happening in England in 1500, only a handful of books being published with woodcuts, and few people commissioning busts as artwork for display in the home. To find images of English people wearing typical English costume in 1500, I have to look at what remains: funerary monuments.

To find which monuments I want to see and where they are, I started with the output of a program that catalogs every feature described in the Pevsner’s Architectural Guides. It would only allow me to save 100 or fewer results in each .csv file, so although I could use the software at the British Library instead of buying it, I had 63 files to combine before I started sorting. Copy, paste, copy, paste, etc.

Once I had a spreadsheet with tabs for the different types of queries I had run (15th century and 16th century lists of brasses, monuments, church windows, church wall paintings, and church woodwork), I had to trim the entries I didn’t need. If the date of death was before 1475 or after 1550, I cut it. I have to look well outside my target years because monuments are not always made soon after death, but many monuments are made within the donor’s lifetime, especially if a spouse died. I also think that accurately recreating the hood circa 1500 will require me to know well what type of hat it evolved from, and what it evolved into. I have no interest in clerical costume, so I deleted priests and bishops (how very Henry VIII of me, I thought). Men whose monuments did not include a wife also got axed. I found that the glass, woodwork, and painted walls did not have subjects of use to me — I want images of the rich nobles who were funding the churches, not allegorical scenes, animals or inscriptions.

Then I started searching for images of the carved stone monuments. I am most interested in seeing these, as effigies are the most realistic art I can find. The monumental brasses of the time are not only two dimensional and smaller than life size, but the art on them is simplistic with inaccurate human proportions and very little perspective to the line drawings. They not only ARE flat, they LOOK flat. Although the brasses are what I knew best from my research time in the UNC Art library (there are far more good books about brasses than about memorial sculptures) they are not the ideal resource for recreating three dimensional clothing and accessories.

Oh Google image search, how I love thee. Many of the monuments on my list do not have effigies, and some of the effigies are so badly weathered or defaced as to be impossible to interpret. I can only judge the quality of a monument, and decide how hard to work to see it, if I know what costume details I might be able to glean from it. I also finally found a use for my Pinterest account — when I do image searches and find effigies or brasses, I save them there.

Once I had images, I began sort the monuments and brasses into four costume types: 1 is solidly 15th century dress (a Burgundian gown or a sideless surcoat, headgear is not similar to gable hood, but one of the other crazy styles). 2 is transitional dress (between Burgundian and Henrican) without a gable hood, but often with a hat that features a wide band on the front similar to the lappets on the gable hood. 3 is transitional dress with a gable hood that hangs down in front. 4 is anything later, more Henry VIII in style, including large sleeves, a gable hood with lappets flipped up, or a French hood.

I am most of the way through my first attempt to find the monuments, with over 100 images found. Those I cannot find, I will look up in the printed copies of the Pevsner Guides (conveniently located in my local library, a 10 minute walk away). I have looked up a few of the hard-to-locate monuments in the books and found sometimes an alternate spelling of the name, a revised date of death, or a more complete description of the monument which helped me locate an image. I also plan to search for images of brasses, but if I don’t find them easily, I don’t plan to scour the internet for photos — brasses just don’t attract as much attention as monuments, so fewer of them are online.

Once I rate the monuments according to how useful they will be for my research, I plan to make a map and start planning church-combing adventures. I’ll have to figure out which churches are locked and which require keys, and whether any have restrictions about photographing or making brass rubbings. It wouldn’t hurt me to learn a little bit more about making good digital photographs in low light, and I need to buy paper and wax for brass rubbing. I’ll need to read up on each church, getting as many clues as possible about where to look for the brasses, which are sometimes on walls behind furniture or on the floor under a rug. I have a lot to learn. I’m thrilled to be making progress.