Free One for Sorrow by Chloe Rhodes Page A

really need.

Early to bed and early to rise
    Early to bed and early to rise
    Makes a man healthy, wealthy
    and wise.

    In the days before electricity, the hours of daylight dictated people’s working patterns and this rhyme, thought to have been in use since the sixteenth century, explains the benefits of maximizing productivity by going to bed at sunset and getting up with the dawn . It first appeared in print in this form in John Clarke’s collection of proverbs   Parœmiologia in 1639, but around 1450 Dame Juliana Berners wrote in her ‘Treatise of Fishing with Angle’ (published around 1496, and part of her   Boke of St Albans ):

    As the olde englysshe prouerbe sayth in this wyse. Who soo woll ryse erly shall be holy helthy and zely [fortunate].

    The saying was popularized in the United States by its inclusion in Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack of 1735 and remained popular in anthologies of children’s rhymes throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
    Another verse, which appeared in Little Rhymes for Little Folks in 1812 sheds light on the attitudes towards oversleeping that prevailed at the time:

    The cock crows in the morn,
    To tell us to rise,
    And that he who lies late
    Will never be wise:
    For heavy and stupid,
    He can’t learn his book:
    So long as he lives,
    Like a Dunce he must look.

    The phrase is still used traditionally today, though its slightly high-handed moral tone has invited modern subversions. In 1939 American satirist James Thurber wrote his own interpretation in The New Yorker , ‘Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead,’ which has proved almost as enduring as the original.

Man cannot live by bread alone
    This biblical proverb contains such an important Christian message that it appears in the Bible three times. In Deuteronomy and in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
    The Bible story that best explains the meaning of the phrase is the Temptation of Christ described in Luke (4:3). Jesus is in the desert having fasted for forty days when the Devil comes to taunt him. He tells Jesus to use his divine power to turn the stones at his feet into loaves of bread so that he can satisfy his hunger, but though he is on the brink of starvation, Jesus replies ‘It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.’ The Christian interpretation of this episode is that the Gospel is what really sustains mankind and gives life value and that though the body can be sustained by food and water, to be truly alive man must follow the will of God according to the scriptures.
    The phrase is still used by Christians to advocate the benefits of a modest but spiritual life, but it is also often used in more secular terms to express stoicism in the face of material hardship, implying that there are more important things in life than the trappings of wealth. Since the twentieth century the phrase has been upended and is sometimes used as a tongue-in-cheek way of justifying over-indulgence.

Frost on the shortest day bodes a bad winter
    The winter solstice occurs on either 21 or 22 December in the northern hemisphere. It marks the day on which the sun is lowest in the sky at noon, and the hours of daylight are at their shortest. Since the twelfth century this day has been known by some Christian churches as St Thomas’s day (others have it as 3 July), which features in several pieces of folklore. Celebration in these dark days was crucial to keeping up the spirits and it was traditional for farmers to make their last slaughters for the Christmas table on the shortest day, something that is illustrated by the following rhyme recorded in 1846:

    The day of St Thomas, the blessed
    divine,
    Is good for brewing, baking, and
    killing fat swine.

    Another tradition held that the wind direction on St Thomas’s day would stay the