St. Barbara’s Grain
Only in the south of France, they say, is to be found the custom of planting St. Barbara’s grain on the fourth of December. Earthenware dishes an inch or two in depth are half filled with water, on the surface of which wheat is scattered, or the small, flattened seeds of the lentil, a leafy-stemmed plant whose honey-laden blossoms will, later in the year, draw swarms of golden bees to the fields where it is planted. The dish is then set in the warm ashes of the fireplace, or on the deep stone sill of a sunny window, and the grain is left to sprout and grow so that on the table of the Christmas Eve supper there may be this tender promise of the harvest of the year to come—a pale, delicate young greenness in strong contrast with the darker evergreens. The bent old gran’mère by the hearth will tell you, that as the growth is thick and sturdy or scattered and thin, so will be the later harvests of grain, or honey.
The yellow daffodil, or narcissus, is a plant which first grew in southern France, and along the Mediterranean, and it may be that it was some early settler from Languedoc or Provence, who introduced into Louisiana a custom common half a century ago, that had a dim resemblance to this planting of St. Barbara’s grain. The daffodil bulbs were planted in shallow earthenware dishes on the eve of All Saints, and set for three weeks in the warm dark, and later in the sun. The older creoles foretold a fruitful year if the flower bud were well formed by St. Barbara’s day.