St Nicholas falls on a Sunday this year, and to give people the chance to celebrate the saint’s day’s eve (with presents — that’s where Santa Claus comes from, but the Dutch usually celebrate it on the actual day instead of moving it to Christmas) we had only Vespers instead of a whole vigil, and at four in the afternoon instead of in the evening. It seems to have worked.

Congregation: 13 adults, 3 teenagers (counting the eleven-year-old who stands with Secunda and Tertia these days), 4 smaller kids.
Crew: Altar: Fr T on his own. Choir: 5 women, with Fr T filling in as bass whenever he had nothing else to do.
Coordination: Excellent, though at one point it was useful that the choir tends to follow me, because I think I was the only person who sang the right thing (the sticheron melody of the first tone; all the others tried to sing it as a troparion)
Voice: Apart from an intermittent burr because a cold wants to seize me (but doesn’t get much purchase) okay.
Strangeness: It suddenly occurred to me that saying “in the same tone” signals that what follows is something different.

I had so much dough left over that I made six more prosphora to bake later. I didn’t want to put them on the hot baking tray, so used the shallow rectangular Yorkshire-pudding tin as an emergency tray. Whether it was the upright sides of the tin, or the extra half-hour of rising outside the oven, or the ambient-temperature convection with the heat from the main batch, or…

Anyway, a rather spectacular fail. Proper prosphora look like this.

Time: 2:25
Congregation: 20-40, people trickling in all the time. We started half an hour earlier than usual, so a whole lot came in at the normal time.
Crew: Altar: Fr T, adult acolyte, teenaged acolyte. Choir: All but one of us! (SSAAATB)
Coordination: okay
Tunefulness: faltering towards the end when it went from hot and stuffy to intolerably hot and stuffy
Knees: okay; ankles not so okay because a midge (or several midges) insisted on biting me on them.
Voice: started out all right but after a fit of coughing during the Doxology it didn’t recover until dosed with (excellent) Greek moonshine at the party.
Strangeness: In front of the ‘choir line’ it looked like a Greek church with all the women on the left and all the men on the right. On the level of the choir there was one man on the women’s side and five women (in the choir) on the men’s side, as well as a little girl sitting on the choir platform. Behind that it was completely mixed.

Vespers and Liturgy: quiet (17 including choir and altar) but with an actual deacon! The choir seemed to be afflicted with Plague of Frog in Throat, but it was mild and transient. Afterwards a man came to test the fire alarms— when I went to sign his papers (having been specially appointed by Fr T to do that) he said he’d been about to come earlier but then it looked as if there was a service going on. Well, yes.

While my other half was doing the non-weird shopping I did the usual weird Holy Week shopping: flower-arranging foam because the stuff that was in the base for the cross was worn to fragments after three years and the usual flower-arranging woman isn’t there; house slippers (a size too large, it turns out, because they have a different supplier that does get the size right— I was used to buying the next size up); some battery-powered bike lights because they were ridiculously cheap and we never seem to have enough; a black-pattern-on-white headscarf for Holy Saturday.

We sent Very Tall Altar Boy to the supermarket for more eggs to dye red because I’d underestimated the number we needed. The already-dyed eggs now all have crosses and the letters XB for Christos Voskrese. Rather good for Thursday; there have been years that I was finishing the eggs in the community room after Liturgy on Saturday.

After last night’s service —Matins and First Hour of Holy Thursday— I realised it would be pointless to keep a complete record of the services as I did last year. After all, most of the statistics will be the same (last night’s service was actually a few minutes shorter than the same one in 2008, though we made an effort not to read too fast). I do want to keep some kind of record, though, for myself and anyone else who is interested.

This morning when I went downstairs at 7:00 to make prosphora I thought “the crazy days have started”. Now I’m typing this, however, it occurs to me that it’s perhaps the sanest part of the year: we’re never so close to God as in these few days. The only craziness is in daily life. There’s always something unexpected— usually not to do with Holy Week at all: yesterday it was my other half having to go to the optician because his glasses had broken in his hand. (The optician and his apprentice spent about an hour trying to fix the frame, gave up, and put the glasses in a sports frame so he can at least see something). I could manage to dye eggs and make pascha, but there was no time left for laundry or kitchen floor (or indeed to sit down long enough to rest my feet enough not to hurt in church; I think this afternoon I’ll try to get a pair of inlay soles designed for people who stand a lot). Also, the church freezer turned out to be broken— it’s probably been broken for days if not weeks. Having fresh prosphora every Sunday keeps one from noticing, but I was baking ahead for three Liturgies in four days, two of them usually very well-attended. We rescued all but one bag of prosphora, and I think all the kulich (but we didn’t dare open those bags) and put them in Choirmistress’ freezer with the altar prosphora.

There’s already one house guest out of three (briefly four) expected: Very Tall Altar Boy, who is now studying his Greek from Secunda’s book. It’s a first-and-second-year book and he’s in Chapter 4 while she’s in Chapter 11. Secunda herself is doing Dutch, because she’s excused from class today but obviously not from the test on Tuesday.

Now for service 2 of 9, Vespers and Liturgy of Holy Thursday. I’m wearing my newly tie-dyed purple T-shirt that turns out to match my favourite purple top (floppy half-open shirt that needs something under it) perfectly.

Time: 4:35
Congregation: started out 3 (all men), grew to 5 or so (mixed), 1 man was left at the end
Crew: Altar: Fr T (not in the altar except at the beginning) Choir: started out 3, ended up 2, with 5 in the middle; all women (3S, 2A)
Coordination: good
Tunefulness: all right
Knees: Oh, yes. Also feet, calves, thighs, buttocks, hips, back and sides, shoulders, arms, hands, chin and throat (my black headscarf is scratchy) and forehead (there’s sand on that floor). I did manage to do all the prostrations, though the prayer of St Ephrem the Syrian in the First Hour caught me unawares.
Voice: normal, a bit wobbly at the end of Matins on account of weepiness.
Strangeness: It’s daily Matins so the Lauds are read rather than sung. I love those psalms, especially 148, “Beasts and all cattle; Creeping things and flying fowl. Kings of the earth and all peoples; Princes and all judges of the earth; Both young men and maidens; Old men and children”. Also, four hours of darkness is absolutely no preparation for having the Ninth Ode and all the rest of Matins in the light.

Lesson learnt from the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete: however hard you try, it’s never good enough. This is a lesson I so must not learn.

Lesson learnt from the life of St Mary of Egypt: the only joy worth the trouble is what you squeeze out of the bare rock, painfully, by utter asceticism. Every bit of fun that’s easier to obtain is intrinsically sinful.

Years ago, Fr T forbade me to attend this service because it tended to teach me these lessons. It’s not for nothing that after the service it’s wine-and-oil (beer and deep-fried potato balls in my case).

Great Compline, Litia, Matins and First Hour.

Time: 2:15
Congregation: started out 4 besides altar and choir, only one was left at the end. It was a Tuesday night, of course, when nobody expects to go to church.
Crew: Altar: Fr T on his own Choir: 3 women; we sang most of the plain stuff in unison.
Coordination: good!
Tunefulness: good enough, especially as we mostly ignored Fr T when his cold made his voice go all over the place.
Knees: standing too long made them unfit for kneeling, so I had to sit between the two instances of the prayer of St Ephrem the Syrian to let them relax.
Voice: normal with a little burr at the end.
Strangeness: the service has intrinsic strangeness. It starts very Lentish, though with God is with us in the elaborate setting; then it becomes an all-out feast for Matins, and goes back to Lent very abruptly with the First Hour cutting in before the proper end of Matins.

In the box are the 100 bliny I promised. In the dish in front of it the other 59. The last two are tiny, but the batter was too much for just one.

Now I can write up the recipe for the Purplish Cooking Pages and give the comparison table some headings. This was the largest version of the recipe; I can safely label it “about 150”.

We had the third Resurrection Gospel last night, Mark 16:9-20. Something bugged me about it, so I did some research:

So which is true? And which really happened— which is another thing? The point is that we can’t know whether Mark’s or Luke’s version or neither of those is the “correct” one until someone invents a read-only time machine. But it doesn’t matter: both versions are read in the Orthodox Church as part of Resurrection Gospels, because both the hardness of heart at the resurrection and the exultant sharing of experiences are relevant.

According to BibleGateway, “the most reliable early manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20” so it ends at 16:8, “So they went out quickly and fled from the tomb, for they trembled and were amazed. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” A good ending, but without the closure one wants in a gospel, so I’m not surprised that someone added the twelve verses that comprise the third Resurrection Gospel. Where they got them from —word of mouth, other writings, their own imagination— we can’t know any more than we can know what “really” happened.

I wonder what Bible literalists make of discrepancies like these, but somehow I don’t feel like making an effort to find out.

Time: 2:15
Congregation: two, apart from altar and choir; one left during Vespers and one in the middle of Matins.
Crew: Altar: Fr T and an adult acolyte (his son) Choir: 1 soprano, 1 alto (and at times Fr T singing bass)
Coordination: decent
Tunefulness: okay, except for the times we went up, up, up, unable to stop it
Knees: didn’t start to hurt until I sat down afterwards
Voice: frog in throat, but basically all right
Strangeness: the altar people were in blue, though it’s a feast of Christ. Fr T said later that this is because of the strong overtones of the Mother of God, and indeed most of the verses are from Psalm 44 and there are several stichera with the theme of “after forty days, his mother gives him out of her hands”. Also, I saw parallels with the Presentation of the Theotokos, which I intend to blog about when my head stops hurting (slept badly and not very long).