1st of January - New Years Day, St Cedd’s Day
1st of January is the 1st day of the year
New Years Day:
The choice of January 1 as New Year’s Day is somewhat arbitrary. Did the world begin on that day billions of years ago? Indeed, we have not always celebrated New Year’s on January 1, March 25 (why not?) as the Feast of the Annunciation used until 1752 here, when the Gregorian calendar was introduced. Many superstitions are associated with the day, the best known (particularly but not exclusively in Scotland) being ‘first footing’, when typically a man, generally dark haired, has to be the first over the threshold of a house just after the new day begins. In some places he brings a lump of coal for extra good luck – doubtless a variation on the linked idea that it’s bad luck for the fire to go out on New Year’s Day, and worse to give an ember from yours to another. We continue to add traditions, the many January 1 dips in the freezing sea and the Mad Maldon Mud Race among them.
St Cedd’s Day:
St Cedd was a Northumbrian, brought up with his brother Chad and two other brothers on Lindisfarne under the guidance of St Aidan. Cedd worked as a missionary in Mercia, and then was given the task of re-converting the East Saxons. Some sources name him as the second Bishop of London. He was a participant of some standing at the Synod of Whitby, acting as interpreter at times – clerics here would have spoken a variety of languages including Gaelic, Frankish and Old English. His feast day is October 26th, the day he died in 664.
Incredibly we still have a very substantial physical link with St Cedd, in the form of the remarkable chapel of St Peter at Bradwell on the Essex Coast, built by Cedd in the 650s using stone from the ruins of a Roman fort there.
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