A Waldorf inspired story about the winter solstice and making beef tallow candles

By Julia Bell

I wrote this story I’m about to share with you for a group of school children during Winter Solstice.

Since the start of the school year my kids Waldorf school group has been coming out to our farm for field trips, and their experiences are woven into the curriculum.

This December, as we approached the shortest day of the year and they focused on making gifts, I led them through making candles out of beef tallow.

This is the story I wrote to set the stage for candle making. I hope you enjoy the rich underlying tones of resourcefulness, love and reverence we hold for our animals!

This story starts in the winter time, in a land far far away where there lived a village of people, and the village was named Nordman. They had lived in this same high mountain village for many generations. Their great great grandparents had settled the land, their parents continued to farm the land and live in harmony with it. Now they were raising their children in this same beautiful village nestled in the mountains.

The people did not have grocery stores, but rather they grew things, made things and gathered things.

They made baskets from reeds they gathered. They made bows and arrows from the forest twigs, built their own houses from bricks they formed from mud, and they made tools from stone they chipped away on until they were razor sharp. They gathered items they needed like logs, wild berries, flowers. They also traded goods with their neighbors when someone else had something they needed. Each family specialized in one main thing, then they shared with each other.

Some families were very very good at making clothes. They grew the sheep, sheared the sheep, spun the wool into yarn, then knitted wonderful things like coats, hats, gloves and socks.

Some families were shoemakers. They used great big needles that they made out of porcupine quills. They sewed pieces of leather together to make shoes of all sizes and for all ages of people. They were beautiful, wonderful shoes.

Some families were gardeners. They grew cotton for making pillows and comforters. They grew flowers for dying the wool beautiful bright colors. Some gardeners grew herbs for medicines, poultices and tinctures. Beautiful marigolds turned white wool into a bright yellow color as warm as the sun. There were hollyhocks of a deep sky blue color that were exquisite when knitted into a warm winter hat. All the children loved to wear their blue hats in the dark, cold, rainy winter time.

But ALL families had these 3 things:

1 cow for milking
10 chickens for eggs and meat
And a great big garden that grew potatoes, onions, corn and grains to feed themselves.

Every year, in about March, when the skies were still stormy, but little flowers were popping up out of the ground, the families milk cow gave birth to a calf. The children loved to welcome the new life into the world by tying a beautiful red and white twine around its neck. It was a gift to the new life and a welcome sign…as if to say:

“We’ve been patiently waiting your arrival ALLLLL winter long! This means that spring is very near!”

As the calf grew bigger and stronger on his mama’s milk, the days started to get warmer. The days also started to give more light. The rains came some days, but not everyday, like they had done in the winter time. The grass, which had been sleeping all winter, started to wake up. It was hungry for light and warmth so it reached its arms up high towards the sun. The earth gave it a nice long drink with fresh cool rainwater at night, and during the day the warm golden sun nourished the grass with it’s golden rays.

As the days got longer and the grass grew taller, the calf grew bigger too. Now he was big and bulky and strong and eating grass more often than he drank his mama’s milk. Soon he was nearly as large as his mama and he didn’t need her much anymore.

The rains stopped coming as often and soon the sun shone for more than half the day. There was more light than darkness and so the calf had more time to eat and grow and lay in the sun. He was getting rounder and plumper every single day!

Some days the sun shone so hot that the cows liked to find a big shady oak tree to lay under while they chewed their cud. The hot sunny days without much rain turned the grass a little brown and crispy and the cows didn’t find it to be so yummy anymore.

By the fall time the people of the village started to think about harvesting their gardens. Their corn and wheat had dried up and was ready to grind into polenta and flour.

Their pumpkins were a deep golden orange color and their apples were dark dark red. The fat calf was also ready to be harvested.

There was to be a great celebration in the land of Nordman. The cotton farmers were harvesting their crop to make into pillows, comforters and clothes.

The flower farmers harvested their flowers to dry and make dyes to color their clothes. And each family harvested their fattened calf.

The first day of the great celebration the calf was killed and they lifted their voices to the heavens. They sang songs of thankfulness for the calf’s life and for the nourishment it would bring them in the winter months ahead.

Next they skinned the hide and sold it to the shoemaker. He would carefully tan the leather to make into beautiful shoes for the people of his village.

The meat was then cut into small pieces and cured with salt, then carefully stored.

The bones were put into a giant pot with water, salt, herbs and vegetables to make a bone broth stew. This stew would nourish and sustain their bodies for the winter months ahead. It would give them the strength they needed heading into winter when the sunlight was less and the rains make them cold everyday.

The cows fat was trimmed from the meat and collected to be made into candles. Since families had no electricity in this high mountain village, they relied on candlelight for their night time studies, games and stories.

Rance, age 7. The candlemaker in his home with his firewood storage.

Even when the days got shorter and the sunlight grew dimmer, and they could barely remember the days when the green lush grass covered the pastures, they would have candles to light the room.

The candlelight reminded them of the brighter days that would return in the springtime.

And the light gave them time in the evenings after supper to read, play the fiddle, play games, hear stories, and make things with their hands.

It brought the families so much joy to have extra light in their homes. They could learn new songs, practice their knitting and crocheting, hear new stories-all because they had candle light.

And so this story of the fattened calf ends, the story of the people of Nordman in a land far far away.

As this story relates to our farm, we actually raise our calves for two seasons before we harvest them. For the purpose of creating this story I say it was one season of life and then the harvest. The true bits of this story is that we believe each new life on the farm is a gift and treated with reverence for the nourishment it will bring. We give thanks when we butcher it and we use every part of the animal we can.

The bit about the people of Nordman living in the same village and farming the same land as their ancestors feels close to my heart because farming has been in Blake’s lineage as far back as he can remember. Starting with our boys being raised on this farm, Blake grew up farming, his Dad and Grandpa both grew livestock and crops.

I will be sharing how to make beef tallow candles in another blog post coming up!

Leave a comment below: what trade would your family have specialized in if they lived in this community so long ago?