That One Michaelmas [HOUN]

Today is September 29, so Happy Michaelmas everyone!  After today’s meeting, I’m looking forward to a goose dinner and cake for dessert.  Of course, we will have to go vote for our local magistrate, and I guess all of the lawyers and judges will have to receive their annual blessings as well.

Wait, I seem to be getting nostalgic for days gone by.  Instead I watched the last game of regular season baseball and there’s a family birthday party later today.  What happened to the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels and Michaelmas being the start of the judicial and academic years?  

And what does September 29 have to do with Sherlock Holmes?

Duh, only Holmes’s most famous story, The Hound of the Baskervilles.  You remember all of the great parts of that story: 

“Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

“The desolate, lifeless moor”

Selden, the Notting Hill murderer

Stapleton

…. And Michaelmas

Okay, some of you have blank looks on your faces.  It all went down around the time of the Great Rebellion and the lord of Baskerville Manor, Sir Hugo, was known to all as a cruel, godless, and profane man.  He was lusting after a yeoman’s daughter, but having enough sense she avoided him at all costs.  

While her family was away one night, Hugo and his cronies kidnap this maiden from the family farm and bring her back to Baskerville Hall.  The men lock her in a room and continue to drink and carouse downstairs while she escapes and runs across the moor.  Baskerville finds her gone and sets out for her with his hounds.

The rest of the men join in the chase along with their pistols and booze.  Empowered by the bravery that groups of drunken men seem to always have, they ride out after Hugo and eventually come across the hunting dogs, all whimpering and slinking away.  

Past that, the kidnapped woman laid dead from exhaustion and fear and Hugo Baskerville’s body was also nearby.  Plucking at the dead Baskerville’s throat was “a great, black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye had rested upon.”  As the beast’s blazing eyes turned toward the drunken mob, the party was definitely over.

We get to hear how those guys were broken men for the rest of their days and about a family curse, but nobody ever mentions that Hugo Baskerville ruined Michaelmas.  Like so many other drunken assholes throughout history, one guy ruins it for the rest of us.  Yeah, his family was cursed by a dog, but I think the Baskerville curse is why we don’t get goose dinners, feasts with friends, or Michaelmas mattress sales today.

Instead of all of the possibilities that a modern Michaelmas could bring us, we are stuck with Halloween decorations for sale in September and unrelenting political ads that will continue for weeks and weeks.  

Hugo Baskerville: ruiner of holidays.