A change in the weather - Cathedra Petri as a seasonal reference point

Today is the feast of Cathedra Petri, or the Chair of St. Peter, a liturgical celebration about which I have written before (here). This feast belongs to the annual cycle as laid out in the liturgical year of the Latin Church, it is a feast that celebrates the legendary founding of the bishopric of Antioch by Saint Peter, and it serves to remind Latin Christians that it is Saint Peter who is the first apostolic successor, i.e. pope, and the forerunner to the popes of Rome. 

In the medieval annual cycle, liturgy and manual labour were intertwined in the church calendar, in which specific labours were assigned to specific months, following the rhythm of agrarian life. In this way, the feasts of the church year became important reference points for farmers to talk about the annual cycle, and the calendar provided reference points when making plans for the work that needed to be done. 

This coupling of the liturgical year and the cycle of labours on the land was disseminated across Latin Christendom, including Scandinavia. Here, the feast became known colloquially as Pederstol, a literal translation of the Latin name. This date, Pederstol, remained in the collective memory of Scandinavians even after the Protestant Reformation changed the framework of religious life and did away with the feasts of the saints. It is a testament to the potential for longevity contained in such deeply embedded cultural practices that even my grandmother (born in 1912) and my parents (born in the 1950s) grew up with Pederstol as a reference point in the yearly cycle. I first learned about this from my grandmother, and my parents are still, to this day, using the term as a way to orientate plants. 

In recent folk memory, as exemplified by my family, Pederstol is seen as the transition from winter to spring. It is not necessarily so that spring sets in at this particular date - it might still very wintry outside - but a change is beginning, and thaw might have started to work its power in spite of appearances. For this reason, some types of work that depended on snow or ice - like transporting timber or hay from the sheds far away from the farm - could be deemed to risky to undertake. The ice might not be trusted, and the snow might be found too soft and rotten to provide a solid foundation for the sled. It was not necessarily that winter was over, but that winter was less reliably wintry. 

In the present times, when weather patterns are changing due to global warming and the old points of references become superannuated, Pederstol remains a relevant feature. Yesterday, my parents and I went for a trip on the ice on the lake behind the house of my late grandparents. The thaw that had set in a few days ago had separated the ice from land, but once you got onto the ice it remained perfectly safe, as long as you are careful and pay attention to the patterns of change. When we got back, my mother commented that this could not be done after Pederstol, meaning that it would be too risky, and the ice would possibly be too weak, disintegrating from within with changes in the temperature. Today, on Pederstol itself, I woke up to a grey mist and a hard rain falling on the sheet of ice still lingering in its fought-for place, and even though it remains safe at least today, it would be very risky to try it. Pederstol is still a good point of orientation, therefore, for deciding what activities to do.