Oak Apple Day

Oak apples on the forest floor, c. Laura Harrison McBride 2013

There's one thing one notices fairly soon after moving to the UK: the place is a feast of small celebrations.

Today, for instance--May 29--is Oak Apple Day. Who even knew there was such a thing as oak apples? As a horsewoman, I had heard of road apples all right; those lumps of digested grass and oats left behind by horses. Love apples, too, are familiar. They are simply tomatoes, or as the French call them, pomme d'amour after the supposedly aphrodisiacal powers of the fruit.

But oak apple day. Different. Sort of like the unicorn? No. According to Mike Williams, PhD, "Oak Apple Day or Royal Oak Day is a festival celebrated in Britain on 29th May to mark the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, after the interregnum of Oliver Cromwell’s Republic. Its roots, however, like those of the oak itself, might go far deeper."

Williams' blog, Prehistoric Shamanism, gives quite a complete history of the celebration as well as the older understandings of the meanings of oak, particularly in Druidry. The word druid might have been derived, he notes, from language for "lover of the oak."

I'm fairly certain I was born a Druid. When I was seven, we lived in a flat in a borough of New York City known as Queens. There were a few parks nearby, one named Farmer's Oval in fact, but most of the trees lining the streets were maples and catalphas. I knew all about pollynoses--or as the rest of the world calls them, helicopters--and happily peeled apart the nut and stuck the green leafy wings to my nose along with all the other neighbourhood kids. But I had never seen an oak.

The lot my parents bought for the construction of our new home was on eastern Long Island, about an hour from NYC . It was virgin land covered with scrubby oaks.

Long Island is little more than a glorified, 115 mile by 25 mile sand bar. This was both good and bad, in my childhood opinion. I loved being able to go to the beach often; I loathed the abundant ticks that had been dispossessed when the woods were felled all over the island, and deer herds decimated.


My first visit to the lot for our new home was when my father went out to mark the trees he wanted left behind by the bulldozers. I was so taken with the acorns that had fallen everywhere that I gathered a bucket of them to bring home. I asked my mother for a box to put them in; I kept them under my bed and looked at them occasionally.

And then the demanding life of a seven-year-old intervened. There were dance classes, and homework, and visits to Grandma's house, and treks with Grandma for ice-cream sundaes, and my new colouring book.....So the acorns were left alone in their dark casket for quite a while.

When I finally remembered them, several seasons had passed. Indeed, it was almost time to move to the new house. I pulled out the box and opened it up, and there, crawling everywhere, were little white worms.

Ick. I don't doubt that I screamed. I also don't doubt that my mother screamed when she came running; bugs and icky things were not her strong suit. She threw it all away, made me wash my hands and probably the rest of me as well since she was also a bit of a germ freak and wouldn't have wanted me to catch "acorn bug disease." And so ended my love affair with acorns.

Frankly, I still don't like them much. OK. The little hat thingies are cute. But all I can really see when I encounter an acorn is a split shell with a semi-opaque wiggly thing coming out of it.

I might, however, come to love Oak Apple Day, providing no one reminds me too often that oak apples are merely the place a certain kind of wasp creates to hatch its disgusting larvae.