The mid-winter holiday was celebrated in ancient times, and is making a comeback.
Ages ago, when our car loving ancestors first spread out salt upon the Earth to melt the ice, they noticed a trend; their cars started rotting with a disease similar to leprosy! Some thought, “this a minor problem”, but some, those few most enthusiastic about their vehicles, thought to divide their vehicles into two groups, those to be preserved and those to be sacrificed.
They called them Summer Cars and Winter Cars. In the old German, “Genussvolles Sommerauto” and “Wintertreiber”. You could use the Winter Car during the summer, but not the Summer Car during the winter, unless you moved South.
Eventually, a tradition appeared among the most enthusiastic car guys, the Feast of Midsaltide.
Celebrated midway between the first salt fall of autumn, and thus the last day the Summer Cars were allowed on the road, and first cleansing rain of Spring, and thus the first day the Summer Cars were allowed back on the roads, though these dates varied by the local calendar, we finally settled on a single day.
Saltwinter's Eve arrives on January 29th this year, and we’ll hold vigil for the real holiday the next day, the 30ths Midsaltide Feast!
Saltwinter’s Eve is traditionally celebrated with bourbon while sitting on the stoop to your garage staring at your car under its cover. If the car is parked remotely, you stare at nothing, or you stare at the first unfinished project car, or the second unfinished project car. Sometimes you may stare at the third unfinished project car. But only if the winter thus-far has been extremely deep and cold. The bourbon is optional, the staring is not.
Whether you sip your preferred beverage or not, you must thumb through your favorite parts book, ours probably the Moss Motors Catalog, though some versions of this tradition require Jeggs or National Parts Depot, JP Cycles or the really demented of the followers flip through a tome called “MOPAR Parts Catalog”. You work your way front to back examining upholstery, (leather seat covers look, feel and smell nice), disk brake upgrade kits, 5 speed or overdrive transmission kits and circle the ones you really want. When you reach the back of the catalog, you go back to the start and put an X through those you know you can’t possibly afford without marital strife, like the leather seat covers, the disk brake upgrade kits and the 5 speed or overdrive transmission kits.
After a few more drinks, and maybe a reorganization of your pliers drawer in your toolbox, it’s a mess and you know it, you head back inside to binge watch some Top Gear, saving your strength for tomorrow. For tomorrow is The Feast of the Midsaltide!
At first light, around 08:36, you grunt and fart your way out of bed and into the bathroom, and about 09:30 you eagerly head down to the garage stoop where you circled all the options the night before. When you fling open the garage door, what do your wondering eyes behold? Boxes and boxes of spares have arrived as if by magic overnight! Boxes filled with those leather seat covers, the 5 speed transmission kit, the disk brake conversion kit and more! You open more and more boxes, uncovering things you forgot you ordered, but somehow they arrived just the same. How many will you remember ordering for yourself? No idea.That’s part of the fun!
It’s The Feast! Will you get them all installed before the great unsaltening in April? Who knows! The important part is that your wife didn’t notice the charges in December with all the other bills for Christmas, you managed to slip in all the stuff you wanted to work on before Spring. That new soft top! In mohair! (I don’t know how you shave a mo and weave its hair, but it is soft.) That new-to-you set of wheels, they were a great find on Marketplace. That rear sway bar that is so sorely needed, because your car that handles like a go-kart and you drive like an old lady heading to church needed tighter traction on cornering is here too. It’s indeed, the Feast of Midsaltide. You’ll get to the upgrades soon, for now, the fresh coffee does nothing for the sub-freezing weather in the garage. So with a sigh and a “see you real soon”, you head back inside to warm up and prepare your story for how these things all arrived on the same day.
January 20th, The Feast of the Midsalttide comes to a close around noon, with visions of clean engine bays dancing in our heads, we go back to our winter slumber, counting down the next 75 days until April 1st, the day we’re allowed to retrieve our cars from storage, though it’s usually too cold to drive them anywhere but home.
Look for your Saltwinter’s Eve card in the mail mid-January.
-Ken