Carnivals, Celebrations and Ceremonies | Cornwall and Up Country

This is one of two signs outside Penzance Railway Station (the one pointing north) that I took a photograph of last Saturday (27th June) when my friend Vanessa and I arrived for the Mazey Day celebrations. At this time of year there are many outdoor carnivals, festivals, music and theatre productions taking place in Cornwall. Not that such celebrations are restricted to mid-summer as Helston Flora Day (May), Padstow Obby Oss (also May), the Gorsedh Kernow Ceremony (September) and other such  events testify.

Personal celebrations and ceremonies - including weddings and renewal of vow ceremonies, namings, funerals and memorial ceremonies -  can also take place outdoors, local to the place where you live or elsewhere. So if you live in Cornwall you may want to travel 'upcountry' for your ceremony or alternatively travel to Cornwall from elsewhere in Britain or further afield. Like many other UKSOC celebrants I am happy to travel with you or too you in order to ensure you have the bespoke ceremony that you want. 

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For those of you interested in the origins of Mazey Day the following is taken from http://www.purelypenzance.co.uk/tourism/festivals.html

The Golowan festival (Cornish for midsummer) is the festival of St. John and is held in Penzance each year in late June. Although it is an old tradition, it was revived by a group of artists and local schools in 1991 in order to remember the local area heritage. The festival is ten days long, culminating in the Mazey weekend and notably Mazey Day on the Saturday.

Golowan was one of the last mid summer festivals practised in Cornwall. In the 1890’s, the Penzance government outlawed the festival due to the rising insurance premiums for the towns business community. Traditionally the towns streets were lined with alight tar barrels which were paraded around. . . . 

The modern Golowan is arguably a little less dangerous. The celebration of the area's arts and culture attracts thousands of visitors to West Cornwall . . . .  The core of the celebrations is Mazey Day, when the streets are filled with market stalls and entertainers and the town's school children parade up and down Market Jew Street, setting out from St.Johns Hall, holding aloft large paper mache and wicker creations. It truly is a sight to behold, with some figures being larger than the building around them. . . .

OR check out the Golowan official face book page https://www.facebook.com/pages/Golowan-Festival-Official-Page/277967782386

A Celebrant’s Imagination (3) | Life Experience, Family and Friends

Falmouth

This final blog entry in my Celebrant’s Imagination series is written back home in Falmouth. My parents and I settled here in 1970 after four years of travel. My parents favoured Coverack but were worried it might be isolating for an 11 year old girl (me). It was a pin in the map that brought us here. We lived in the town for eight years before finally moving to Coverack, just a few months before my dad’s early death. Although my mum stayed in Cornwall (except for a few years in the 1980/90s when she lived nearer to me during a particularly difficult time – see below) it took me 34 years to get back (via London, Cheshire, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Coventry and Plymouth). I’m still travelling though as clearly this part of my particular socialisation has had a lasting influence.

In thinking again about my particular path to celebrancy my positive and negative life experiences are equally relevant. Just a short extract from something I wrote for an academic conference on motherhood and mothering last year:

I’m thinking back to the day when my mother thought I meant to kill myself.

No babies for me, it seemed. A realisation I felt painfully emotionally and physically. . . a complete challenge to all my hopes and expectations. On the day in question I ran from my mum towards the river. ‘Don’t, don’t,’ she shouted running after me. But I never intended to jump and I wasn’t running from her but from myself. . . .

I have adapted. I have been fulfilled in other ways. The following nearly 30 years have been busy. I feel privileged to have been able to spend so much time researching and writing about issues such as pregnancy loss, infertility and childlessness. Issues that I and others feel are important, yet often misunderstood and/or misrepresented. I am grateful for the meaningful relationships I have with the children, and more recently, grandchildren of others. But I feel sure that I would not have survived intact, reformed as whole without my mother’s support and unconditional love. For her it was all about me, always about me and it was not until after her death that I realised she never, ever, spoke of her own loss, no babies for me; no grandbabies for her.

Dorothy Thornton (MY MUM)

It was at my mother’s funeral in 2012 that I finally decided that I would like to become a civil celebrant. Although I chose the music and the readings (just as I did for my husband John’s funeral two years earlier) and read a eulogy that I had written the service was still not what I hoped for, officiated by a man who appeared not to have listened to anything I had told him about my mum; my Dorothy.

Alongside the significant losses in my life the constant positive affirmation from my parents, the encouragement from my two husbands (especially John), the caring and continuing support from my small extended family (both biological and via marriage) and my work-based relationships all make me the person that I am.  And of course there is another group of people that are hugely important to my personal auto/biography, to myself; my friends. Recently sociologists have begun to research and write about the increasing focus of many on ‘friends as family’. The significant others we couldn't do without and who are, or should be, central to the ceremonies and celebrations in our lives. This is certainly, absolutely relevant to me.Without my friends, a few in particular (they know who they are), life would be much harder and so much less fun. 

Celebrant's Imagination Word Cloud