Andrew Watt

The last several years, and beginning even before we were married, my wife and I have given bayberry candles as presents at Winter Solstice. Usually, we attach a red ribbon and a tag with one of the many surviving rhymes from US colonial-era folklore:

  A bayberry candle burnt to the socket brings food to the larder and gold to the pocket.

Or possibly you’ve heard a slight variation on this.

  A bayberry candle burnt to the socket puts health in your body and gold in your pocket.

Or again, the longest one my wife and know of (but not always the one we use).

  These bayberry candles come from a friend:
  On [Christmas] Eve or New Year’s Eve, burn it down to the end.
  For a bayberry candle burned to the socket
  will bring joy to the heart & gold to the pocket.

It wasn’t until this year that I found myself wondering why it was that bayberry, so specifically, should be the key ingredient in this charm for the New Year. So I began to do some research, and made a couple of intriguing discoveries.

First, I was startled to learn that bayberry (Myrica cerifera) is native to North America rather than a European import. Originally found on the Mid-Atlantic coast from Delaware to southern Connecticut, English settlers successfully transplanted it to the Caribbean, too.

That meant these charms were neither Welsh nor English in origin. Instead, they were the result of Europeans learning important lessons from the new landscapes of New Jersey, Long Island, Rhode Island, and Cape Cod — possibly through interactions with Native peoples who already lived here, definitely through study of the plant itself. Both Natives and colonists used bayberries as a potent but somewhat risky medication taken as a tea or syrup for exciting and supporting the immune system. More often, though, the berries were boiled in order to extract the wax and essential oils to make candles that scented the air and allegedly drove off disease. Somewhere along the line, Europeans learned that the berries were risky to ingest but easy on the lungs and throat.

One of the plant’s other interesting features is that it creates nodules in its root system — tiny organic caves, almost — which serve as sheltered homes for symbiotic fungi that fix nitrogen in the soil at rates even higher than most legumes. Gardens with bayberry bushes thus tend to thrive, because they make this key nutrient available to other species in their environment. Plant bayberries, and your garden would thrive.

So the rhyme, which for many years my wife and I thought to be of English origin, is really of American origin — the result of communication between original inhabitants, European settlers, and the plants themselves.

And so, after many years of following this custom of giving out bayberry candles to burn at Winter Solstice for prosperity and health in the new year, I can regard it as a special tradition that doesn’t come from Scottish crofters or English peasants or even Welsh carolers parading beneath a Mari Llwyd horse-skull. No. It comes from us. It’s native to here. And maybe that’s a path forward for us all — to recognize that we don’t have to spend all our time regarding our European ancestors as the sole source of spiritual truth. To some extent, it’s necessary for us to recognize that we’re here on this ground, and our spirituality and customs have to be rooted in the places where we live and where our children and grandchildren will grow old. And maybe that means that we have to walk with greater grace and acceptance of the First Peoples who lived here, and honor what they taught our predecessors.

With that in mind, I decided to write my own rhyme, and add to the folklore around this little bit of winter magic, the bayberry candle.

  Our foreign forebears learned to know this land,
  and humbled themselves to learn its treasures.
  Bayberry made golden soil from sand,
  wafting aromas of year’s-end pleasures.
  “Friends, please come, burn these bayberry tapers;
  warm up at the hearth, sing songs of good cheer;
  drink of this wine, eat salmon with capers —
  tell tales to last ’til the turn of the year!”
  So it had happened in long-ago days,
  as the bayberry burned to the socket —
  and shall again, when we revive old ways,
  and treat friends better than gold in pocket.
  Then, a New Year rich with health, wealth and peace,
  is ours for giving — and getting — with ease.