THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 14, 1995 TAG: 9505120246
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 29 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY WYNN DOUGH
LENGTH: Short : 48 lines
In this week's photo from the past, John Herbert, long prominent in the Old Christmas celebration at Rodanthe, prepares Old Buck for another climactic appearance, probably in the late 1960s.
When Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar, it omitted the dates between Sept. 3 and 15, 1752, canceling errors that had accumulated under the Julian, but moving subsequent holidays up 11 days.
A few settlements, such as Chicamacomico - comprising present-day Rodanthe, Waves and Salvo - stubbornly kept Christmas on Jan. 5. Other rural parts of the American colonies merged the superseded Christmas into the new Epiphany on Jan. 6, reviving a dual observance abandoned some 1,400 years before.
Regardless of its date, Old Christmas turned secular at length. On Hatteras Island, groups of revelers went from house to house, sometimes in costume, making music and cadging food and drink. Now and then their nominal leaders carried the head of a cow or steer mounted on a pole, a mascot that evolved into Old Buck. Whether the initial choice of a bovine head was influenced by legends of the ``mad bull of Trent Woods'' or by the main course at a community dinner is anyone's guess.
These practices may have come from the British Isles, but they're at least superficially similar to John Kuner, a year-end festival of African origin in which a horned figure, the ``rag man,'' led itinerant groups of merrymakers.
John Kuner (John Canoe, Jonkonnu and so on) was popular among slaves and freedmen in the West Indies, with which the Outer Banks traded often.
It was unknown in this country except in eastern North Carolina and southeastern Virginia, wherein the 19th century white residents sometimes mimicked it. A connection with the predominantly white Banks is therefore plausible. Whatever its source, the Rodanthe celebration, held on the Saturday after New Year's Day, is the last of its kind. MEMO: Wynn Dough is curator of the Outer Banks Histroy Center.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo courtesy of the Outer Banks History Center
John Herbert prepares Old Buck for another Christmas.
by CNB