Good Morning Mystic

Four-thirty a.m.  Why did I get up at such an ungodly hour?  Didn’t I know that if I got up at 4:30am I would surely suffer the torture of gravely eyes and groggy brain and groaning muscles by 7:00am? 

Wait a minute.  Did I say 4:30am was an ungodly time of day?  You know, there are those who claim that 4:30am is a perfectly normal and quite natural time of the day for women to rise and shine.  Really.  Four-thirty in the morning is called the “witching hour.”  Yes, that’s right.  Back in the day women would roll out of bed and stumble to the fire/hearth/whatever.  They’d light the fire and then sit around stirring the pot, round and round.  Stirring, getting warm, chatting – or not.  I suspect they’d have a warm cup of something to start the day.  How did a simple and necessary, everyday activity like women sitting around a cauldron in the pre-dawn darkness to make breakfast became a Halloween caricature? 

I imagine (isn’t too hard to do) that men who were not included in the chit-chat and whispers and laughter and prayer shared among the women at the fire were suspicious of this strange nocturnal activity.  What on earth were those women doing, those men wondered.  It’s the pre-crack of dawn and those women appear to be enjoying themselves!  They must be up to no good.  Up to something evil, those crazy women.

Did I say that 4:30am is an “ungodly” hour?  Silly me. The witching hour has come!  Get me to my cauldron!  Time to get to work!