Garlic was an essential ingredient in Irish folk medicine, and thought to be a cure for consumption and a bad cough. Garlic planted before noon was held to have curative properties, and would be ready for pulling and use between August 15th and December 8th, the Feast of the Assumption and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It was also thought lucky to sow oats on Good Friday – oats sown on that day would never rot.Īfter potatoes, the most significant Good Friday planting was garlic. If you were not fully ready, you could set just one small corner of a garden or field. It was also traditional to plant cabbages and turnips on Good Friday. In any case, it was imperative that all the spuds be covered before the cuckoo was heard. If Good Friday was late, and fell in April, it was seen as the point up to which such work should focus. This was termed “ putting down the early pot”, and the people worked each day from Good Friday until they had set all the potatoes. While many followed the maxim of planting with St Patrick, on March 17th, and digging with King William, on July 12th, most had a custom of setting their scealláin, or seed potatoes, on Good Friday when it fell in March. Elsewhere, shrubs and bushes were set in confidence that they would thrive.īut Good Friday’s biggest planting connection is with potatoes. The Muskerry Gaeltacht of Cúil Aodha has a long tradition of planting a tree on Good Friday. This was also the reason for a prohibition on burning wood, especially as it would have had to have been sawn or cleft.īut it was a busy day for farms, given the belief that anything planted on Good Friday was certain to grow. That’s also why many blacksmiths, carpenters and other workmen would be idle for the day: they would not use a saw or hammer nor drive a nail on the day Christ was nailed to the Cross. The meat nailed to the timber was seen as another analogy with the Crucifixion. There is an usual connection here, as it was also considered disrespectful on Good Friday to have any meat hanging from the ceiling, and people took trouble to unhook their flitches of salted bacon from the nails in the rafters.
#William singe haircut Patch
Men who were developing a bald patch used to attribute it to the unwelcome drips that periodically fell on their heads from the side of bacon hanging in the rafters. But men would not shave, as it was most unlucky to draw blood on the day of the Crucifixion.
In addition, washing your hair on Good Friday was thought to guard against headaches. Girls believed that hair cut on this day would grow thicker and longer – twice as thick and twice as long, according to some accounts. To begin with, Good Friday was the most significant day to have a hair cut. But if we go back a generation or two, via the rich repositories of Irish folklore, we find a cluster of interesting observances and traditions that must have made Good Friday at least a little more exciting and active than the times I remember.
It was solemn, depressing and difficult to get through. In short, there was nothing good about Good Friday. This was also a day when those fond of the secular retreat to their local tavern – I have my late father in mind – were instead condemned to a day of forced abstinence. Growing up in the 1970s, I remember a foreboding about Easter, with obligatory guilt-ridden religious observations of confession and the Stations of the Cross. My memory of Good Friday is that it was the most boring and uneventful day of the year. But these long-forgotten Irish traditions might liven it up
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