Hunting For Conkers

Perhaps it is the fact that I'm so accustomed to moving and changing house every few years that makes me love traditions so much. When everything in your life tends to upend quite often it's nice to have certain things you return to again and again. Autumn is full of traditions; there's pumpkins to carve and meals to prepare, decorations to be scattered around the house, costumes to be considered and candy to be devoured. Moving to Ireland has brought new fall traditions, like plum and apple picking on Thomas's family farm. This year we even made our own homemade jam, a new tradition we look forward to doing again next year while learning from our many mistakes! Another new-to-me tradition is conkers. It's something Thomas grew up doing; hunting down the oldest chestnut tree in hopes of gathering the largest possible conkers. Then you take your conker, harden it by any means necessary, drill a hole it in, string with a shoelace and head out to battle. You fight conker-to-conker in solo matches, each person taking a turn to swing their chestnut at the other's, the first chestnut to break loses. A good conker might last several such battles before an untimely end or well-deserved retirement. It's a very traditional game in these parts dating back to the 1800s although I believe it's banned in most schools these days (and you can understand why children swinging hardened nuts at each other on the end of strings might be undesirable in the school yard...), but even as we were out taking these pictures at this majestic horse chestnut we were joined by several children on their own conker hunt. Banned or not, the game lives on. We will probably do a few conker fights this autumn with our favorites, but the rest we'll keep around the house as a bit of autumn decoration and perhaps as the old wives's tale suggests: spider repellent.