Word: rites
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...Rayner, a Tory, made an eloquent plea to Food Minister John Strachey. All that he asked on behalf of his constituents in the tiny Devonshire village of Kingsteignton was one ram. Each spring for many centuries (no one knew exactly when it began) the villagers celebrated a legendary pagan rite: they thanked the gods for their spring water by sacrificing a ram. Then they drank and danced, roasted the ram and feasted on the mutton. Rayner pleaded: "Is the Minister aware . . . that it is very unlucky to interfere with customs and traditions which have been prevalent for so long?" Regretfully...
...Kingsteignton's rescue came Baron Clifford of Chudleigh, who invited the village's ram-roast committee to the deer park of his 3,000-acre estate, let them shoot a buck. With that slight deviation to modern complexities, the village planned to carry on its ancient rite this week. But Kingsteigntonians were still rankled by the irreverent crack of a Communist M.P. during Rayner's plea. The Commie sneered that this was "one of those heathen customs the Conservative Party wants to retain...
Publicity-doting Hugh Dalton snuggled cosily into this rite. At his cottage in Wiltshire he posed with an armful of pussywillows. He walked the woods-"Before a budget I always seek out the trees." He listened to chirping birds, and he gathered violets and brought them to his office at 11 Downing Street. There, in his final hours of travail, he sat at a desk "overlooking the forsythia and almond blossoms in the garden of No. 10," reported London's Evening News...
...Rite of Spring. But this year farmers, who got only $3.39 a gallon for syrup under OPA, would not have to worry about price. It was already up to $5 a gallon, and many Vermonters were holding...
Nearly a third of Vermont's 24,000 farmers produce maple syrup or sugar, making the state the nation's top producer (1946 output: 633,000 gallons). But many of the farmers who sell the syrup by mail to friends regard sugaring more as a sentimental rite of spring than as a business. Their philosophy is that "It don't cost me nothin' to make sugar. If I wasn't doing that I'd just be fixin' fence." And sugaring, with wives and children turning the gathering and boiling of the sap into...